Friday 4 May 2012

Excel VBA Data Warehouse Generator Tool

Recently I was observing our database development team, and I observed that much of my colleagues were struggling with lots of boiler plate code. In the process of generating Dimension and Fact tables (in snow flaked schema), I thought it would be nice to create an easy to use tool to generate database schema with the following rules in place:

1. Each dimension table would have a primary key, combined with identity auto generation.
2. A dimension table may have referential constraint upon another dimension table
3. A fact table will have multiple referential constraints from multiple dimension tables but not from any other factual table.
4. A fact table will not have a primary key nor an identity column.

This tool is primarily an assisting tool for repetitive process occurred in the data warehouse table structure generation, though for any other design requirements developer intervention is very much required to meet the special conditions.



To use the tool, there is a main page where all the relevant information needs to be set like connection string, script folder path and updated database on which the operation needs to be performed once the list is refreshed.

Control Page:


Dimension Page:


Fact Page:


Then there is a SQL Server Management Studio style dimension and fact table generation worksheets where user can set the desired columns required according to the business needs along with integrated drop down list on the Table Link column where the refrence dimension tables can be selected(The table name for dimension and fact wil be appended by keywords "Dim" and "Fact" respectivly. And also for the dimension tables the key columns as they will be auto generated via VBA and appended terms like "Id").

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