Trace an everyday business action—like a sale, signup, refund, or support call—from real-world activity into a captured record. You will learn to spot the event, the timestamp, the participants, and the facts a BI report can use.

Separate the durable business things—customers, products, stores, employees, accounts—from the events that happen to them. You will practice reading activity as a set of entities with changing facts and descriptive attributes.

Decide exactly what one row or observation represents before you count or average anything. You will compare order-level, line-item-level, customer-day, and snapshot grains to see how the chosen grain shapes every result.

Apply the previous explanations in a guided problem.

Classify fields as measures you calculate with or dimensions you group and filter by. You will reason through totals, averages, rates, labels, categories, and IDs so a report answers “how much” and “by what” clearly.

Read time fields as business meaning, not just dates on a screen. You will distinguish event time, recorded time, reporting periods, fiscal calendars, time zones, and “as of” snapshots so trends and comparisons stay honest.

Apply the previous explanations in a guided problem.

Check your understanding with a short quiz.

Recognize common messes that distort BI reports: duplicates, missing values, late-arriving records, cancellations, returns, status changes, and inconsistent labels. You will decide whether each issue changes the event, the entity, the measure, the dimension, or the time logic.

Write plain definitions for report fields so different readers interpret them the same way. You will define a metric or attribute with its source event, grain, filters, time rule, and allowed values without drifting into vague business shorthand.

Apply the previous explanations in a guided problem.

Check your understanding with a short quiz.

Review this chapter with practice based on your mistakes.