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Data & Analytics · Foundational

Fact Table

The central table in a star schema that stores numeric measurements of business events plus foreign keys to dimensions.

Definition

Fact tables are usually narrow but very long. Each row corresponds to the declared grain, such as one order line. The main types are transaction, periodic snapshot, accumulating snapshot and factless fact tables.

Example

FactSales(DateKey, ProductKey, CustomerKey, Quantity, SalesAmount)

Exam tip

Fact tables are on the 'many' side of relationships and contain the numeric columns you aggregate.

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