Foundation: The Customer Dimension
Adventureworks sells products to Stores that then resell these products. These are called Resellers. It also sells products via it's online store directly to Individuals. These are known as Retail Customers.
As you can see from this Diagram, Adventureworks Customers includes both People (Retail Customers) and Stores (Resellers)
While there are many ways to handle this, in this training, we will denormalize both the Person Name and Store Name into a single field for our Customer Dimension.
Let's note a few important considerations about the data in these tables:
- The Person table contains different types of people indicated by the PersonType field,
- The two types we're concerned with now are SC = Store Contacts and IN = Individuals (Retail Customers).
- In addition, The Customer table contains some records with both a personID and a StoreID.
- In these cases, The PersonID actually refers to a Store Contact, not a Retail Customer.