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What Is A FACTLESS FACT TABLE?Where We Use Factless Fact

A factless fact table is a fact table that contains only dimensional attributes and no numeric facts. It captures many-to-many relationships between dimensions to track events or conditions, like student attendance or product promotions. While fact tables typically contain measurable facts, factless fact tables allow flexibility in data warehouse design and can be used to answer questions without needing separate fact tables.

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234 views3 pages

What Is A FACTLESS FACT TABLE?Where We Use Factless Fact

A factless fact table is a fact table that contains only dimensional attributes and no numeric facts. It captures many-to-many relationships between dimensions to track events or conditions, like student attendance or product promotions. While fact tables typically contain measurable facts, factless fact tables allow flexibility in data warehouse design and can be used to answer questions without needing separate fact tables.

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WOVISAX
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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A factless fact table is a fact table that does not have any measures.

It is essentially an
intersection of dimensions. On the surface, a factless fact table does not make sense, since a
fact table is, after all, about facts. However, there are situations where having this kind of
relationship makes sense in data warehousing.

For example, think about a record of student attendance in classes. In this case, the fact table
would consist of 3 dimensions: the student dimension, the time dimension, and the class
dimension. This factless fact table would look like the following:

The only measure that you can possibly attach to each combination is "1" to show the
presence of that particular combination. However, adding a fact that always shows 1 is
redundant because we can simply use the COUNT function in SQL to answer the same
questions.

Factless fact tables offer the most flexibility in data warehouse design. For example, one can
easily answer the following questions with this factless fact table:

 How many students attended a particular class on a particular day?


 How many classes on average does a student attend on a given day?

Without using a factless fact table, we will need two separate fact tables to answer the above
two questions. With the above factless fact table, it becomes the only fact table that's needed.

What is a FACTLESS FACT TABLE?Where we use Factless Fact


We know that fact table is a collection of many facts and measures having multiple keys
joined with one or more dimesion tables.Facts contain both numeric and additive fields.But
factless fact table are different from all these.
A factless fact table is fact table that does not contain fact.They contain only dimesional
keys and it captures events that happen only at information level but not included in the
calculations level.just an information about an event that happen over a period. 
A factless fact table captures the many-to-many relationships between dimensions, but
contains no numeric or textual facts. They are often used to record events or coverage
information. Common examples of factless fact tables include:
 Identifying product promotion events (to determine promoted products that didn’t sell)
 Tracking student attendance or registration events
 Tracking insurance-related accident events
 Identifying building, facility, and equipment schedules for a hospital or university
Factless fact tables are used for tracking a process or collecting stats. They are called so
because, the fact table does not have aggregatable numeric values or information.There
are two types of factless fact tables: those that describe events, and those that describe
conditions. Both may play important roles in your dimensional models.

Factless fact tables for Events


The first type of factless fact table is a table that records an event. Many event-tracking
tables in dimensional data warehouses turn out to be factless.Sometimes there seem to be no
facts associated with an important business process. Events or activities occur that you wish
to track, but you find no measurements. In situations like this, build a standard transaction-
grained fact table that contains no facts.
For eg.

The above fact is used to capture the leave taken by an employee.Whenever an employee
takes leave a record is created with the dimensions.Using the fact FACT_LEAVE we can
answer many questions like
 Number of leaves taken by an employee
 The type of leave an employee takes
 Details of the employee who took leave
Factless fact tables for Conditions
Factless fact tables are also used to model conditions or other important relationships among
dimensions. In these cases, there are no clear transactions or events.It is used to support
negative analysis report. For example a Store that did not sell a product for a given period. 
To produce such report, you need to have a fact table to capture all the possible
combinations.  You can then figure out what is missing.
For eg, fact_promo gives the information about the products which have promotions but still
did not sell

This  fact answers the below questions:


 To find out products that have promotions.
 To find out products that have promotion that sell.
 The list of products that have promotion but did not sell.
This kind of factless fact table is used to track conditions, coverage or eligibility.  In Kimball
terminology, it is called a "coverage table."

Note:
We may have the question that why we cannot include these information in the actual fact
table .The problem is that if we do so then the fact size will increase enormously .

Factless fact table is crucial in many complex business processes. By applying you can
design a dimensional model that has no clear facts to produce more meaningful information
for your business processes. Factless fact table itself can be used to generate the useful
reports.

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