I''m kind of embarrassed that I only discovered C. J. Date aka Chris Date and his writings (and presentations on O'Reilly) this summer, and that only due to Ralph Kimball...

Although looks like NoSQL mostly turned into SparkSQL. The relational database still seems to be working 50  years on.

I used to think I knew what 1NF and 3NF was in a relational database. Then I watched a class by C. J. Date and relearned otherwise.

True that.

Steve, thanks for all the blogs. SQLServerCentral is the first email I read in the mornings. I plan to do my first presentation this month, and to start a blog....

XP and other processes developed in late 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming . Kent Beck's books was published in 1999.

I learned Git on the command line, and still prefer it. I hate having to learn how to use all of the different GUIs: GitHub, GitLab, DevOps. As you said,...

And to answer your question, I'd make the SharedTeamKey it's own dimension and link to both Sales and Payments.

You need a shared Date dimension as one of the conformed dimensions....

From the man who "wrote the book" on Star Schema: http://blog.chrisadamson.com/2011/11/conformed-dimensions.html

And the Data Warehouse people:  https://www.kimballgroup.com/2011/06/design-tip-135-conformed-dimensions-as-the-foundation-for-agile-data-warehousing/

For Microsoft Power BI types:  https://guyinacube.com/2021/02/10/handling-multiple-fact-tables-in-power-bi/

Memory is pretty cheap these days. My analytical "database" is the Microsoft Power BI VertiPaq engine, which is fast. My store is Azure Data Lake Storage (cheap, and unlimited size)....

In Microsoft Power BI, best practice is to separate Date and Time to make model size smaller. Optimizing High Cardinality Columns in VertiPaq - SQLBI https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/optimizing-high-cardinality-columns-in-vertipaq/

You need to have some Facts in your Fact table. DimAmount should be part of the Fact table called Amounts. So just merge that in there. Other than that I...

I'd try setting up a Profiler or ExtendedEvent session to detect what activities/queries are occurring at your memory spikes. Memory goes up during processing as copies of data are kept...

If you like Sharp's, also read Bernard Cornwall's The Fort. Read it cold, no previews. About a forgotten episode in the American Revolution. And Paul Revere.

Answer since 2010 is Excel PowerPivot, which let's you have millions of rows in Excel, makes it like a reporting database. Then Power Query in 2013, which gives you good...