|
What are fact tables and dimension tables?As mentioned, data in a warehouse comes from the transactions. Fact table in a data warehouse consists of facts and/or measures. The nature of data in a fact table is usually numerical.
On the other hand, dimension table in a data warehouse contains fields used to describe the data in fact tables. A dimension table can provide additional and descriptive information (dimension) of the field of a fact table.
For e.g.If I want to know the number of resources used for a task, my fact table will store the actual measure (of resources) while my Dimension table will store the task and resource details.
Hence, the relation between a fact and dimension table is one to many.What are fact tables and dimension tables?Business facts or measures and foreign keys are persisted in fact tables which are referred as candidate keys in dimension tables. Additive values are usually provided by the fact tables which acts as independent variables by which dimensional attributes are analyzed.
Attributes that are used to constrain and group data for performing data warehousing queries are persisted in the dimension tables.
|
