BIS 445 DeVry All Week I Labs

Note! Submit your assignment to the Dropbox located on the silver tab at the top of this page. (See the Syllabus section
"Due Dates for Assignments & Exams" for due dates.)
Remember This! Connect to the iLab here.
iLAB OVERVIEW
Scenario and Summary
You will start with a comma delimited file that looks like this:
When you are finished moving the data into the data warehouse, you will have split the customer, order, and product
information into their own tables and, as a result, create a star schema that looks like this:
As you can see, the FactOrders table has become a fact table containing statistics we might want to analyze as
managers of a company. The fact table contains the primary keys of the other tables as foreign keys. Also in the fact
table (FactOrders), we have stored the result of Price*Quantity in a newly created column called Sales_Total.
Sales_Total is a fact we would like to analyze using an OLAP tool, such as a pivot table, in the future.
The primary key of the FactOrders table is a Surrogate_Key which has been generated by the database management
system.
In the star schema, the products and customers table have become dimension tables. Furthermore, the star schema
removes the duplicated customer and product names that existed in the original comma delimited file and puts them in
normalized customer and product tables.
Last of all, the star schema violates the third normal form, which says that no calculated fields should exist in the design
(schema). In this case, the Sales_Total column is a calculated field.
This violation isn't a problem because in a Decision Support System, software that accesses a data warehouse, it is
acceptable to violate normal forms if it speeds up SQL queries by minimizing table joins and storing calculations in the
database.
Your task is to create a star schema that is capable of holding the information in the comma delimited file, and then
load the star schema with the data from the text file. You will load the comma delimited data file into a temporary table
in the SQL database. After you design the star schema, you will use SQL statements to populate the star schema with
the necessary data from the temporary table. Finally, you will analyze the data by order year in order to find out which
customers have the highest to lowest sales.
Deliverables
Submit the YourName_Lab2_Questions.docx to the Week 2 iLab Dropbox.
BIS 445 DeVry Week 3 iLab
Using Enterprise Data to Create Pivot Tables
Note! Submit your assignment to the Dropbox located on the silver tab at the top of this page. (See the Syllabus section
"Due Dates for Assignments & Exams" for due dates.)
Remember This! Connect to the iLab here.
iLAB OVERVIEW
Scenario and Summary
You are working as a data analyst for a large manufacturing firm. You have been asked to develop a series of pivot
table queries, which will present aggregated views of corporate data that can be used for decision support and trend
analysis by decision-makers.
Using SQL, you can create aggregated views of your data. Pivot tables are especially useful if you are analyzing large
volumes of data. For example, if you wanted to determine the average value of sales for each sales person in your
database, you could use a pivot table to aggregate thousands or millions of sales records. This is much faster than
attempting to scroll through all of the available records.