EXPERT RESPONSE
The question, "How do I build a data warehouse?" is very open-ended. I would
suggest that you look at the current crop of data warehousing books that discuss how to best build a data warehouse.
Your second question about how to reference dimension tables from a fact table, is one that I can provide some guidance. When creating a dimension table in a data warehouse, we generally create the tables with a system generated key to unqiuely identify a row in the dimension. This key is also known as a surrogate key. The surrogate key is used as the primary key in the dimension table. The surrogate key will also be placed in the fact table and a foreign key will be defined between the two tables. When you ultimately join the data it will join just as any other join within the database.
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