Newbie Question on Fact tables

[Bygbobbo]

I am new to OLAP and a little confused about what the term fact table actually means. Can anyone clearify exactly what a fact table is?
(1) Is it a predefined data warehouse?
(2) Is it a table that you create to hold foreign key relationships to dimensions you want to create using OLAP?
(3) Something else?

thanks for the help

 

[spenglerr]

Hi,

actually it has s.th. to do with your basic data. Imagine an example:

your store is selling products. So you have a table about all sales. This is the fact table. The fact table holds foreign keys to other tables containing the information about sales region, customer, kind of product, ... these are the dimension table.

In a report run you build then from the fact and dimension tables a cube. This means you are aggregating the fact tables information for the different dimensions in a multi-dimensional cube of preaggregated tables. That's it.