What is fact table? - Definition from WhatIs.com.
Event capturing fact-less fact. This type of fact table establishes the relationship among the various dimension members from various dimension tables without any measured value. For examples, Student attendance (student-teacher relation table) capturing table is the fact-less fact. Table will have entry into it whenever student attend class.A factless fact table is a fact table that does not have any measures. It is essentially an intersection of dimensions. On the surface, a factless fact table does not make sense, since a fact table is, after all, about facts. However, there are situations where having this kind of relationship makes sense in data warehousing. For example, think about a record of student attendance in classes.A Transaction table is the most basic and fundamental view of business operations. These fact tables represent an event that occurred at an instantaneous point in time. A row exists in the fact table for a given customer or product only if a transaction has occurred.
A fact table stores quantitative information for analysis and is often denormalized. A fact table works with dimension tables. A fact table holds the data to be analyzed, and a dimension table stores data about the ways in which the data in the fact table can be analyzed. Thus, the fact table consists of two types of columns.Fact tables are the foundation of the data warehouse. They contain the fundamental measurements of the enterprise, and they are the ultimate target of most data warehouse queries. There is no point in hoisting fact tables up the flagpole unless they have been chosen to reflect urgent business priorities, have been carefully quality assured and.
Bill Inmon vs. Ralph Kimball: These two data warehousing heavyweights have a different view of the role between data warehouse and data mart. Factless Fact Table: A fact table without any fact may sound silly, but there are real life instances when a factless fact table is useful in data warehousing.
