Fact vs Dimension Table

A fact table captures the data that measures the organization's business operations. A fact table might contain business sales events such as cash register transactions or the contributions and expenditures of a nonprofit organization. Fact tables usually contain large numbers of rows sometimes in the hundreds of millions of records when they contain one or more years of history for a large organization.

Dimension tables contain attributes that describe fact records in the fact table. Some of these attributes provide descriptive information; others are used to specify how fact table data should be summarized to provide useful information to the analyst.