Physical Design in Data Warehouses

During the logical design phase, you defined a model for your data warehouse
consisting of entities, attributes, and relationships. The entities are linked together
using relationships. Attributes are used to describe the entities. The unique identifier (UID) distinguishes between one instance of an entity and another.

Following figure illustrates a graphical way of distinguishing between logical and physical designs



During the physical design process, you translate the expected schemas into actual
database structures. At this time, you have to map:
■ Entities to tables
■ Relationships to foreign key constraints
■ Attributes to columns
■ Primary unique identifiers to primary key constraints
■ Unique identifiers to unique key constraints

Posted in: Data Warehouse