What are aggregate tables in the data warehouse?
Aggregate tables contain aggregated data that are precalculated summaries derived from fact tables.
Why do we use aggregate tables?
A query in simple systems provides results for a single use case, such as when dealing with a single student, a single customer, and so on. On the other hand, in a data warehouse, a query generates large result sets. Let’s suppose we want to retrieve data from multiple tables using a query in which we do some mathematical calculations. Since we have a large amount of data, it may take some time. To make it faster and more reliable, we create an aggregate table in which aggregated data is provided.
Uses of data aggregation
It helps organizations achieve their business objectives.
It helps with the statistical analysis of groups of people.
Data aggregation can help improve our marketing.
It also helps in improving our sales and purchases.
How to create aggregate tables
We can create our aggregate tables using the following:
T-SQL statements from SQL Server
Power Query
DAX using Summarize or GroupBy or other aggregation functions
We can create aggregate tables with the help of many tools, some of which are given below:
GoSpotCheck
Stata
Using the above tools, we can create aggregate tables from our available data.
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