How does location impact your business? Do you know, or are you just guessing?

"They" say that 80% of all business data can be mapped to a particular location or at least a geographic area, yet most BI platforms have only limited capabilities for location-based visualization and analysis. Although some have made the argument that location no longer matters in the digital world, I think those who make this argument are missing the point. After all, customers, potential customers, employees, and other corporate resources all exist someWHERE in space. Why is this aspect of business analytics so often ignored in the major platforms?

I will be presenting some of what we've been doing at the OBIEE seminar in London in November

What is a Bridge Table ?

If you want to connect two tables where there is no relationship, you can use a third table, or bridge table for connecting them. This table will have common columns in both tables, this is used in BMM Layer.

You would mainly use a bridge table to perform a many-to-many join without the bridge table being seen as the fact table. The bridge table is then joined in the Business Modelling Layer and 'tagged' as a bridge type or assignment.

Many-to-many relationships can cause nightmares in the modelling and, producting correct and

How to avoid a bridge table?
There are several approaches:

Hide the many-to-many relationship. You can publish two versions of the schema: the full one for use by structured reporting and a handful of power users, and a version that eliminates the many-to-many relationship for use by more casual users.

Eliminate the many-to-many relationship by collapsing or aggregating multiple rows. Add a row to the many-to-many dimension table: “Multiple rows”. The fact table can then link directly with the dimension. As with all design decisions, the IT organization cannot choose this approach without consulting with the user community. For something which has limited information value, this approach may be quite acceptable.

Identify a single primary row (The top 1) It may be possible to identify a primary row, either based on some logic in the transaction system or by way of business rules.
 
Pivot out the many-to-many dimension (see below the Boolean Column Method). If the domain of the multi-choice space is small, you can eliminate the bridge table by creating a dimension table with one column for each choice.