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How to implement dimension table design when having different values for the same dimension according to specific criteria?

If I have a Dimension Date table like this:


I face the following problem:

Not all weekends and holidays are the same for all the organizational departments, There are default weekends(Fri,Sat) for example but some departments have different schedules so they have different weekend days. How to handle this situation when I have different values for the same dimension according to specific criteria? Should I create multiple versions for the same Dim? How to use Date Dim as a conformed dimension in an enterprise data warehouse in this case?

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Answer

Having the Date dimension as a conformed table is adavntageous when :

  • One central location to update by ETL jobs
  • Easy to implement “Single Source of Truth” because the same copy of data is visible across organization.
  • Less data footprint due to removal of unnecessary copies of the same data.

In your case, you don’t need all the columns so you can have the DimDate table in your database but pointing to it with a simple view to get only columns you need. Also, you can have a bridge table between the DimDate view and the DimDepartment like below :

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A logical data model may contain one or more many-to-many relationships. Physical data modelling techniques transform a many-to-many many-relationships into one-to many-relationships by adding additional tables. These are referred to as bridge tables.

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