Is “data warehouse” just a fancy name for a large database?
Dimensional data is a data that is organized so that individual datums, or datapoints–such as number of products ordered, sales date, customer, location, can be combined along any number of axes, or dimensions. To see what we mean by this, consider that in a spreadsheet, data is arrayed in two dimensions—rows and columns. Say, for example, that you had a spreadsheet that listed customer names in rows and values of transactions in a column. The datapoint in a cell that listed a parituclar customer name and a particular transaction value would have two dimensions. Now imagine that you had 365 such spreadsheets with the exact data format, one spreadsheet for every day of the year. If you were to logically stack them on top of each other, as in a three-dimensional chess game like Mr. Spock plays on Start Trek, you would have a cube, and any data point could have three attributes—three dimensions—customer name, date, and value of transaction. That way you could ask the system to tell you,
