Patent ID: 8352458

Claim:
A method of facilitating transformation of a set of records, the method comprising: determining, by a computer system, a plurality of dimension tables associated with a fact table in a data warehouse; determining, by the computer system, a set of one or more dimension tables from the plurality of dimension tables for which an outer join operation is to be used for adding foreign keys corresponding to the dimension tables to a plurality of records stored in a staging table prior to loading of the records in the fact table in the data warehouse, wherein determining the set of dimension tables comprises: executing, by the computer system, a query in which a first dimension table from the plurality of dimension tables is outer joined with the staging table, and determining, by the computer system, if the first dimension table belongs to the set of dimension tables based upon information determined from execution of the query, wherein the information comprises an indication of whether at least a portion of the staging table was written to disk in response to execution of the query; providing, by the computer system, a query for outer joining the dimension tables in the set of dimension tables to the staging table, wherein execution of the query causes, for each dimension table in the set of dimension tables, one or more foreign keys for the dimension table to be added to the records of the staging table; and creating, by the computer system, one or more lookup transformations for each dimension table in the plurality of dimension tables that is not included in the set of dimension tables, wherein a lookup transformation for a dimension table is usable for adding one or more foreign keys corresponding to the dimension table to the records in the staging table.