Headquarters and Field Sales Sort

[apc]

Hi,

I was reading one of Kimball's articles in the Kimball Group Reader and got somewhat curious about something he says ("7.1 Letting the Users Sleep", Ralph Kimball, DBMS, Dec 1996 and Jan 1997):

"The physical sort order on the disk can be a significant design tool in a data warehouse. In
my data warehouse design classes, I discuss a “headquarters sort” and a “field sales sort.”
The data warehouse designer usually must choose one of these sorts at the expense of the
other. In extreme circumstances, the designer can affect performance by a factor of four
or more, depending on this choice."

Can someone help me understand what is Kimball mentioning when he refers to the “headquarters sort” and “field sales sort.”?

Is this have something to do with partitioning or indexing?

Thanks.

[ngalemmo]

Considering the age of the article, it probably has to do with clustered index tables. Partitioning does not sort contents of a table.

Given 16 years worth of Moore's Law has passed since then (a 256X or more improvement in performance and capacity and the change to a 64 bit address space), clustered indexes are not as useful as they used to be. Simply providing a bunch of memory on the database server goes a long way to improving performance of sorts and joins.