Casino Enterprise Management

Different Perspectives
When analyzing a gaming floor, it is critical that we first find out what is the question that the person is looking to answer, as this impacts on the data requirements. When examining these questions, we will show that in fact there can be more than one correct answer to the question “What are the performance numbers from my gaming floor?” This is covered in depth in an upcoming CEM article.

To illustrate these different perspectives, there are three quite different questions.

1)    From the financial perspective - how much money is my gaming floor making, and what are the contributions from individual games?
2)    From the slot perspective - how are my games performing?
3)    From the marketing perspective - what impacts are my marketing programs or incentives having on my gaming floor?

Slowly Changing Dimensions
Within the world of transaction databases, typically we are only concerned with keeping current records of financial transactions. However in the world of analytical databases, we are far more concerned with putting together a seamless view of the world involving where the data can be analyzed at a future point in time. For example, if we are looking at a gaming floor from Jan 2009 and displaying the results on a map, it is important that the map we are using is correct as of Jan 2009. There are a number of approaches to solving this problem ranging from the Period type which database companies such as Teradata have implemented to using slowly changing dimensions (SCD).

A period type typically has a beginning bound and an ending bound; both of these must be of the same type – DATE, TIME, or TIMESTAMP. A period represents a duration starting from the beginning and going up to the ending bound; period does not include the ending bound.

Using the period type, the process of querying the database is much simpler as the database handles the storage of the history of the objects.

The more traditional approach is to use a slowly changing dimension (SCD). An SCD applies to a situation in which the attribute for a record can vary over time. Consider, as an example, the case of a carded customer Harold who used to live in Las Vegas. So the initial entry in the player lookup table of Casino Silver Nugget looked like:

Customer ID      Name       City           State
123456              Harold       Las Vegas    Nevada

Harold has moved to Henderson now, and the Silver Nugget has to modify the customer table to reflect this change. This is known as the SCD problem.

There are many options for implementation of SCD, the most common one being a Type 2 SCD as shown below. These variations involve adding columns for start date and end date to the record.

In the World of Slots
In the world of slots, the definition of a new record in the SCD is a little more complex than one would think. Following  are some questions that should be considered before defining the SCD record.

-    Do you want to analyze the effect of change of a games location on its performance?
-    Do you want to see the effects of the change of denomination on game performance.
-    How much change in the hold% is important for analytical purposes, for example is 0.01% hold percent change important.
-    Should you track new chip changes to existing games?
-    Does it matter when new chairs are added at a location from an analytical perspective?
-    Does it matter if new signage is added at a location from an analytical perspective?

The challenge is that the more SCD records that are added the more fragmented the data becomes. This balance in requirements between analytical fragmentation and the questions that can be answered makes the process of answering these questions a critical part of the warehouse design.