24 results about "Dimension table" patented technology

In data warehousing, a dimension table is one of the set of companion tables to a fact table. The fact table contains business facts, and foreign keys which refer to candidate keys in the dimension tables. Contrary to fact tables, dimension tables contain descriptive attributes that are typically textual fields. These attributes are designed to serve two critical purposes: query constraining and/or filtering, and query result set labeling. Dimension attributes should be: Verbose Descriptive Complete Discretely valued Quality assured Dimension table rows are uniquely identified by a single key field. It is recommended that the key field be a simple integer because a key value is meaningless, used only for joining fields between the fact and dimension tables. Dimension tables often use primary keys that are also surrogate keys. Surrogate keys are often auto-generated.