Practical universe schema design for ad hoc reporting in web intelligence

Hello Folks,
I am in the initial design phase of creating a universe out of normalized tables in oracle database. This current set of table are outside our data warehouse methodology and work flows. The new Universe will be used for ad hoc query by limited users. There are about 25-30 tables with employee data/attributes (mostly HR data). Since these tables are all dimensions with employee information on various subjects like education,address, training,*employee records* etc, what should be my join strategy with the existing table schema? where is concept of fact table?. Would you suggest any denormalizing/derived or materialized view to get the right end results. Or do you see any ETL process required before starting this task? My main concern is configuring joins between the tables and performance issue due to many joins in the current physical model. Additionally, i am concerned with employee records component in the structure, as each record of an employee may have multiple event history. How would you handle such a situation (maybe create a seperate context with the main factless fact Employee table??)
I will appreciate your insight and approach to tackle the initial planning phase of this project.
Thanks

...due to the fact that with ad-hoc reports, the links, joins, cardinalities etc may differ from report to report depending on what each individual report would require.
Cardinalities are part of the data model, they should not change based on report requirements.
As far as the rest, yes, designing a flexible universe can be challenging. You have the option to set up different join paths (called contexts) for different functional areas, but in some cases it just makes sense to build more than one universe on top of the same data structures.
For an example, consider a very simple case where there is a relationship between an employee and the company motor pool (collection of company cars). The HR person wants to see all people even if they don't have cars assigned to them, so they would require an outer join from Employee to Car. The motor pool manager wants to see all cars, even those that are not currently assigned to a person, so they would require an outer join from Car to Employee. These two requirements are contradictory, and so cannot be designed into a single universe. That's not a problem, it's simply something that needs to be recognized and responded to. An HR person is not likely to care about when the next oil change is due, and the motor pool manager probably does not care about the hire date for a particular person.
Web Intelligence makes an excellent ad hoc query engine, but it does require some investment in a proper universe structure.

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