My favorite data loading aids:

1. The Data Loading Performance Guide White Paper

2. SSIS Operational and Tuning Guide White Paper

There are so many factors that can affect performance, but...

Good article.

There is no "right" or "wrong" way to handle this; however, this methodology (ledgering changes) has two main advantages:

1. Complete auditability and data transparency.

2. Allows for incremental...

Having passed both the CBIP exam and 70-448, I can tell you I feel no smarter for having passed either exam. All it does (for me) is tell me...

Although written for SSAS 2005, this white paper remains very relevant and should provide some nice guidance on how to handle M2M relationships in SSAS......

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=137

Best of luck 🙂

Steven...

In general.........

Facts are the events, or VERBS of your business.

Dimensions are the entities, or NOUNS in your business.

Many to many relationships can occur in two flavors:

1. Relating a dimension...

There used to be a "best practice" of 5 to 15 measure groups (fact tables) per cube by the Kimball Group, but that is a very general rule. It...

Bottom line: It is human nature to cluster. There is good and bad in all of these clusters. Some of these clusters breed excessive fictions, and it...

I beleive Microsoft refers to TRUNCATES as a metadata only operation. They LIST truncates in the "OTHER MINIMALLY LOGGED and METADATA ONLY operations" section of the document.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd425070(v=sql.100).aspx

Good...

Also, I would implement the product map in the staging area of the dimensional load.

I am never one to let a source system architecture drive an analytical solution.

It sounds as if more work would need to be done on the dimensions than anything...

The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit has a good general indexing strategy for type 2 SCDs. It provides an excellent starting point.

For more info on using DQS, MDS (Master Data Services), and SSIS together check out the White Paper/Tutorial:

Enterprise Information Management (EIM) using SSIS, MDS, and DQS together:

...

Slowly changing fact is also a term used by David Marco (who I believe is/was affiliated with the Inmon side of things) in his book Building The Metadata Repository (Wiley,...

Folks using the Kimball Methodology would refer to this concept as an accumulating snapshot fact table. For more information on accumulating snapshot fact tables see the following articles:

Being from Philly, I have but one word to say:

BOOOOOOOO!