Siebel Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse Installation and Configuration Guide > Storing, Extracting, and Loading Additional Data >

About Adding More Attributes to the Data Model

There are two different types of attributes—domained and free text. Domained attributes are restricted to a set of values. An example of a domained attribute is a State column that requests a state within the United States. The State column's domain of values consists of all the states in the United States.

NOTE:  Siebel Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse domain values are different from domained attributes. Domained attributes are source values, not values necessarily loaded into Siebel Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse; they are a set of values that are used for a particular field. On the other hand, domain values are Siebel Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse values for particular fields that are used to create metrics. These values are called Siebel Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse domain values, which are generically referred to as domain values. For more information on domain values, see About Domain Values. For a list of domain values, see the Siebel Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse Data Model Reference.

In addition to domained attributes, your source system may also provide free text attributes, which can have any value. Unlike domained attributes, where there is a select set of values, there are no restrictions on the value of free text attributes. An example of a free text attribute is a description column in which users enter a description. Descriptions can vary widely; there is no standard set of values for descriptions.

Depending on the type of attribute you want to store, domained or free text, there are different recommendations on how to incorporate them into your data warehouse. The following sections describe how to store each type of attribute.