Modeling practices for Shared Ownership DIM tables

[Anonymous]

     A mouth-full--let me unpack. I have a couple DIM tables: Company, station. Both will provide necessary information to my FACT table later on. But they too have a relationship necessary for the model. I need to know what company owns which stations; however, some stations are owned by more than one company. I was curious is there are industry standards or best practices when developing a model with such information. Below I have provided a visual:

I want to be able to provide a Company ID to the Station DIM table that way I can create a hierarchy in the visual space. Company->Station->Equipment etc. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks in advance,

Isaac.

[v-jingzhang]

Hi @Anonymous 

One practice is to separate Company and Station in two Dim tables and have a third table to define their relationships. If in the fact table, company and station always appear as a pair, you can add a new ID column like [StationID]&"-"&[CompanyID] in both Fact table and the third table, and build relationship on the new columns.

For example

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Jing
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[bcdobbs]

First thought is leave them separate and describe the relationship between them in a factless fact table. Literally two columns CompanyId and StationId