Tag: Fact Table
What Is the Star Schema Data Model? An Explanation with 3 Examples
In this article, we will talk about the star schema data model. When should you use this to structure your data? What are its advantages over other data schemas? We’ll answer these questions and more in this article.
What Is a Star Schema? The star schema is a popular approach for designing data warehousing and business intelligence data models. It uses dimensional modeling; in other words, it utilizes dimension tables with descriptive attributes that provide context for the measures in the fact table.
What Are Facts and Dimensions in a Data Warehouse?
Facts and dimensions are the fundamental elements that define a data warehouse. They record relevant events of a subject or functional area (facts) and the characteristics that define them (dimensions).
Data warehouses are data storage and retrieval systems (i.e., databases) specifically designed to support business intelligence (BI) and OLAP (online analytical processing) activities. They are different from databases designed to support transactional systems – e.g., e-commerce sites – whose function is primarily OLTP (online transactional processing).
Facts about Facts: Organizing Fact Tables in Data Warehouse Systems
The process of defining your data warehousing system (DWH) has started. You’ve outlined the relevant dimension tables, which tie to the business requirements. These tables define what we weigh, observe and scale. Now we need to define how we measure. Fact tables are where we store these measurements. They hold business data that can be aggregated across dimension combinations. But the fact is that fact tables are not so easily described – they have flavors of their own.
