The Types of Dimensions in a Star Schema, and How to Use Them

Dimensional modeling organizes data for analysis using a star schema, which consists of fact tables and dimension tables. Fact tables hold quantitative data about business events, while dimensions provide the descriptive context. The main types of dimensions are regular (for entities like customers), junk (for grouping small attributes), and degenerate (like a transaction number stored in the fact table). Other important concepts include conformed dimensions that are reused across multiple facts, surrogate keys for unique identification, and slowly changing dimensions to track historical changes in data.