Homogeneous vs heterogeneous column naming Heterogeneous mapping: Suppose the data warehouse has information from two source systems, and in one source system regions are identified by column name Region_id and in the other the column name is Reg_id , as shown in the diagram below. Though the Region_id and Reg_id columns have different names, they store the same data: information about regions. This is called heterogeneous column naming . The data for the Lookup_Region table came from a different source system than the data for the Lookup_Call_Ctr and the source systems have different naming conventions. Homogeneous mapping: For consistency, it is a good idea for columns that contain the same data to have the same column name. This is called homogeneous column naming . In this case, the Region_ID column has the same name in both tables, as shown in the following diagram:
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