Data Warehouse for Retail Analytics using Microsoft SQL Server

Dominick's Fine Foods - A retail business, faced challenges in analyzing their sales patterns, customer behavior, and product performance due to:

• Scattered data across multiple sources
• Manual data compilation taking 5+ hours monthly
• Inability to track historical changes in product categories
• Lack of unified view for sales and customer behavior analysis
• Complex requirements for analyzing specific product combinations

1. Design two specialized data marts:
   • Sales Data Mart for product performance analysis
   • Store Information Data Mart for customer behavior tracking
2. Implement robust ETL processes:
   • Type-2 SCD (Slowly Changing Dimensions) for tracking dimensional changes
   • Automated data validation and transformation
   • Error handling and logging mechanisms
3. Develop multi-tool visualization strategy:
   • SSRS for static holiday season reports
   • SSAS cubes for historical trend analysis
   • Tableau for interactive dashboards

1. Data Mart Implementation:
   • Created star schema designs for both marts
   • Implemented fact tables (factSales, factStoreInfo)
   • Developed shared dimensions (dimTime, dimStore)
   • Established proper relationships and constraints
2. ETL Development:
   • Built SSIS packages for data transformation
   • Implemented lookup transformations
   • Created derived calculations
   • Set up incremental loading
3. BI Solution Development:
   • Developed SSAS cubes with calculated measures
   • Created named queries for optimization
   • Designed specialized visualizations for each business question
   • Implemented dual-axis charts for correlation analysis

The solution successfully:

• Reduced monthly data processing time from 5.5 to 2.0 hours
• Enabled analysis of 6 years of historical data
• Provided automated tracking of product category changes
• Delivered insights through 5 specialized dashboards
• Created a scalable foundation for future analytics needs