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Data warehousing
In addition to designing and implementing Informix® dimensional databases, you can use tools to create data warehouse applications and optimize your data warehouse queries.
Dimensional databases
The Informix® Data Warehouse Guide provides information to help you design, implement, and manage dimensional databases, and describes the tools that you can use to create data warehouses and optimize your data warehouse queries.
Implement a dimensional database
You will learn the SQL statements that you need to implement the dimensional data model
Implementing a dimensional data model and loading data with Informix® Warehouse
You can use the Design Studio provided with Informix® Warehouse to create a physical data model of your dimensional database based on your relational database. You can specify how to extract, transform, and load the data from your relational database to your dimensional database.

Data warehousing
In addition to designing and implementing Informix® dimensional databases, you can use tools to create data warehouse applications and optimize your data warehouse queries.
- Dimensional databases
  The Informix® Data Warehouse Guide provides information to help you design, implement, and manage dimensional databases, and describes the tools that you can use to create data warehouses and optimize your data warehouse queries.
  - Dimensional databases
    A dimensional database is a relational database that uses a dimensional data model to organize data. This model uses fact tables and dimension tables in a star or snowflake schema.
  - Design a dimensional data model
    To build a dimensional database, you start by designing a dimensional data model for your business.
  - Implement a dimensional database
    You will learn the SQL statements that you need to implement the dimensional data model
    - Implement the sales_demo dimensional database
    - Implementing a dimensional data model and loading data with Informix® Warehouse
      You can use the Design Studio provided with Informix® Warehouse to create a physical data model of your dimensional database based on your relational database. You can specify how to extract, transform, and load the data from your relational database to your dimensional database.
    - Moving data from relational tables into dimensional tables by using external tables
      Use SQL statements to unload data from relational tables into external tables, which are data files that are in table format, and then load the data from the data files into the dimensional tables.
  - Performance tuning dimensional databases
    This section describes how to tune the performance of your queries and to understand data distribution statistics.
- Informix® Warehouse Accelerator
  The Informix® Warehouse Accelerator Administration Guide includes information about installing and configuring the accelerator server, creating data marts, accelerators, and accelerated query tables (AQTs).

Implementing a dimensional data model and loading data with Informix® Warehouse

You can use the Design Studio provided with Informix® Warehouse to create a physical data model of your dimensional database based on your relational database. You can specify how to extract, transform, and load the data from your relational database to your dimensional database.

Before you begin

For specific instructions on how to install and use Design Studio and other Informix® Warehouse tools, see the Data warehousing and analytics node in the Informix® information center.

About this task

To implement a dimensional data model and load data using Design Studio:

Procedure

Start Design Studio and create a new project.
Create connections to your existing relational database and the dimensional database that you will create.
Create a physical data model for the dimensional database. For example, you can:
- Reverse engineer the model based on the relational database schema.
- Manually create a model.
Design data flows that represent the movement of data from the source, through a series of transform operations, and into the target system.
Design control flows that define processing rules for the execution of a set of related data flows.