SAS tutorial - generation of a sample business datawarehouse scenario

This tutorial shows how to use SAS to implement ETL process which generates a star schema datawarehouse architecture.

We assume that you already have basic SAS/BASE knowledge and are familiar with SAS environment, assigning libraries, running SAS programs.

The aim of this tutorial is to generate a datawarehouse structure which would help monitor performance of a sample business scenario described here:
A manufacturing company Data Warehouse Business Scenario - requirements from a palm and tropical plants nursery which implements an analysis and reporting system to track sales, costs, forecasts and business performance management figures.

Tutorial overview:
- First step will be to read dimensions and populate sample dimensions data
- Then a fact table will be created.
- In the next step we will randomly generate transactions for the fact table with sales data for three years. To generate the numbers we will use SAS random number generators with uniform and random distributions.
- The final tasks will be to validate and extract generated data and feed the reporting application.

Please also be aware of the fact that SAS is very powerful and flexible system and the things we show in this tutorial can be done in many different ways. It is just one way to get the expected results.