100 Puzzles to Learn Data Warehousing

Learning how to design a data warehouse may be difficult. Ralph Kimball has some great legacy books on the dimensional modeling techniques, but they are verbose, with complicated examples. Our illustrated examples here are kept simple on purpose, to help you better understand complicated concepts like periodic snapshot fact tables, degenerate dimensions, late arriving facts or dimensions.

We focus our puzzles on Ralph Kimball's dimensional modeling techniques, but we also introduce you to Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) basics, OLAP fundamentals and some other important things you must know about data warehouses in general. We dive deep into slowly changing dimensions (SCD), with other illustrated examples to help you get the ideas in no time.

You need just some basic prior knowledge about Data Warehouses in general. The explanations and external references from the answers to our questions will help you learn the rest. We also assume you already have some basic background in data modeling for relational databases, and SQL.

These puzzles are for Software Developers and Engineers, Database Engineers and Architects, or Data Analysts. Difficulty level is from beginner to advanced.

We've split the 100 questions into 5 quizzes with 20 single and multi-choice questions each. Try solving each quiz separately, writing down on a piece of paper the answer to each question. Then go to the Answers and Explanations section, and learn more from our solutions to the puzzles. Follow the links to external references for a deep dive on the subject.

An interactive version of this book has been implemented on Udemy as 100 Puzzles to Learn Data Warehousing.