Speaking as someone who does his fair share of dimensional modeling, I would just point out that the example you cite could only involve two tables in a well de

Speaking as someone who does his fair share of dimensional modeling, I would just point out that the example you cite could only involve two tables in a well designed dimensional model (sales fact and time/date dimension, I reckon). The challenge is in getting to that point. To speak to OPs point about difficulty in querying data warehouses, most business intelligence tools that I'm aware of provide semantic layer[1]-type capabilities, whereby the user interface of the tool is presented in the language of the business domain. Nevertheless, I still agree that this is still difficult work, unfortunately. That it is getting more complicated in some respects, such as through unstructured data, doesn't help either. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_layer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_layer