Registration Fact, many instructors per fact row.

[chade25]

Ok, so in my schools registration model, I have courses that can be taught by many instructors. I really wanted to avoid a many-to-many. Right now I am recording the primary instructor. What would you guys do? I thought about making a table with many columns, but it seems lazy, but maybe that is a good idea, 1 instructor id per column. I could concatenate, but then costing out things wouldn't be true, so to speak. What do you guys think?

Thanks!

[BoxesAndLines]

Is there the concept of a primary teacher? If so, I would look at going lower on the grain to include course+teacher. You can then aggregate to the course level with a teacher count and include the primary teacher as a dimension. Just a thought.

[chade25]

Is there the concept of a primary teacher? If so, I would look at going lower on the grain to include course+teacher. You can then aggregate to the course level with a teacher count and include the primary teacher as a dimension. Just a thought.

The primary is recorded, but when I can also attach dollars to the course from that regisration, so, it would be nice to record all the instructors to cost out courses, and see which ones are valuable

[ngalemmo]

Do students enroll in a course or a session of a course? No matter... The common approach would be to tag the fact with a reference to the primary instructor, as you are doing, as well as provide a bridge based on course/session, referencing all participating instructors. The bridge can include a flag to indicate the primary, as well as an allocation factor representing each instructor's % contribution to the course.

You would only use the bridge on queries that need to account for all instructors.

[chade25]

Yeah, sometimes its easy to get caught up with wanting everything to maintain the star schema for ease of reporting, but in the end, its not probable.

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