Transaction Fact Tables

In his book The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Ralph Kimball explains that there are three ways to design a fact table.  The first and probably most typical (my opinion) is called a transaction fact table.  A transaction fact table is a fact table that contains measures, keys to dimension tables, and degenerate dimensions, if applicable.  When using this fact table to examine the current state of something going through the business process, all rows should be summed through the latest time period that is being examined.  This is due to the fact that a row is added to this fact table as an event in its respective business process occurs.  The most common example involves the banking industry.  Suppose you open a checking account at Acme Bank on 2/1/14 and make an initial deposit of $3,000.  Three days later you withdraw $200.  Five days after that, you deposit $1,000.  A "plain-english version" of this fact table (without the descriptors) will look something like this:

Date	Amount
2/1/2014	$3,000
2/4/2014	($200)
2/9/2014	$1,000

Now, let's use this table to answer these very simple questions:

1.) What was the account balance on 2/4?
Notice how a row was added each time that a deposit or withdrawal was made.  In order to find the balance on 2/4, we must look at everything that happened through 2/4.  If we only look at the 2/4 row, we will only see the $200 withdrawal.  However, it is important to know that $3,000 existed in the account before that withdrawal.  So, if we sum the 2/1 row and the 2/4 row, we will see that the balance on 2/4 (after that transaction posted) was $2,800.

2.) What was the account balance on 2/9?
Using the same logic that was explained in #1 above, sum the 2/1, the 2/4, and the 2/9 rows.  This will give you a value of $3,800.

3.) How much was deposited on 2/9?
When looking at only one of the events that occured as opposed to the sum of everything that occurred, only that one row should be taken into consideration.  The 2/9 row by itself will tell us that $1,000 was deposited into the account.  Unlike #2 above, we do not need to consider the $2,800 that was in the account prior to 2/9.

In the future we will look at writing some ETL to populate a transaction fact table.  We will also take a look at some additional fact table designs.

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