What is Dimension Table?

Posted on | January 3, 2010 | No Comments

Dimension table contain attribute which describe fact table.In my previous article I explained fact is nothing but  measures to value business like sales.Dimension on the other hand are used to analyze fact.A example of dimension table will be

Region CountryStateCity

Now Fact table will contain some column like sales.So dimension table can be used to analyze sales according to Country like USA,UK.Dimension table generally have  surrogate key as primary key.The size of dimension table is small.Unlike fact table which grows in size dimension table remain mostly static.Referential integrity must be maintained between dimension table and fact table.
Dimension table will generally contain hierarchies.Hierarchy help in analyzing the data.For example in the table the hierarchy is Country,State and City.This help in knowing the sales in particular city,state or country.Mainly dimensional table will contain textual information which make sense like country.year,etc.

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