Data Warehouse: Modelling a future schedule
- by Pat
I'm creating a DW that will contain data on financial securities such as bonds and loans. These securities are associated with payment schedules. For example, a bond could pay quarterly, while a mortage would usually pay monthly (sometimes biweekly). The payment schedule is created when the security is traded and, in the majority of cases, will remain unchanged. However, the design would need to accomodate those cases where it does change.
I'm currently attempting to model this data and I'm having difficulty coming up with a workable design. One of the most commonly queried fields is "next payment date". Users often want to know when a security will pay next. Therefore, I want to make it as easy as possible for them to get the next payment date and amount for each security.
Also, users often run historical queries in which case they'd want the next payment date and amount as of a specific point in time. For example, they may want to look back at 1/31/09 and query the next payment dates (which would usually be in February 2009 for mortgages). It's also common that they want to query a security's entire payment schedule, which might consist of 360 records (30 year mortgage x 12 payments/year).
Since the next payment date and amount would be changing each month or even biweekly, these fields wouldn't seem to fit into a slow-changing dimension very well. It would probably make more sense to use a fact table, but I'm unsure of how to model it. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
