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Referential Integrity Utility for IBM DB2 Cube Views
A utility that finds and fixes referential constraints between tables of a data warehouse for which DB2 Cube Views is enabled.
Date Posted: April 14, 2005
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Update: October 20, 2005
Informational RI constraint validation algorithm is enhanced; Informational RI constraint validation results are changed to "Valid/Invalid".
What is Referential Integrity Utility for IBM DB2® Cube Views?
This utility aids the deployment of DB2 Cube Views by helping the customer or Database Administrator (DBA) to identify and resolve Referential Integrity nonconformance in their data warehouse implementation. Successful DB2 Cube Views deployments require a data warehouse relational schema that has a minimum amount of referential integrity (RI) designed in the fact table and dimension table "join" relationships, such as primary key to foreign key (PK-FK) and unique key to foreign key (UK-FK) semantics. The DB2 Cube Views DBA can use this tool to automatically detect and provide recommendations for missing referential integrity constraints that are necessary for optimal performance.
How does it work? Relational databases and IBM DB2 support a well-known feature that allows a DBA to define constraints and referential integrity between columns of tables in a database schema. In Business Intelligence databases (data warehouses and data marts), there are typically referential constraints defined for and between the following:
- columns of dimension tables that uniquely identify the rows in the table
- columns of the fact table and columns of the dimension tables
- columns of multiple tables used to describe a single dimension
- columns of multiple tables used to describe a single fact.
Generally speaking, a DBA would define a primary key or a unique key on the column(s) of a table that uniquely identifies each row in that table. A foreign key relationship would be defined on a column(s) of a table whose entry references a unique row of another table.
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| | About the technology author(s):
Jian Le is the metadata team lead for the IBM DB2 Cube Views product. He has extensive knowledge and experience in designing and implementing OLAP, data warehouse, and relational database applications. |
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