Rule #4: Ensure that all facts in a single fact table are at the same grain or level of detail.

There are three fundamental grains to categorize all fact tables: transactional, periodic snapshot, or accumulating snapshot. Regardless of its grain type, every measurement within a fact table must be at the exact same level of detail. When you mix facts representing multiple levels of granularity in the same fact table, you are setting yourself up for business user confusion and making the BI applications vulnerable to overstated or otherwise erroneous results.

Rule #5: Resove many-to-many relationships in fact tables.

Since a fact table stores the results of a business process event, there's inherently a many-to-many (M:M) relationship between its foreign keys, such as multiple products being sold in multiple stores on multiple days. These foreign key fields should never be null. Sometimes dimensions can take on multiple values for a single measurement event, such as the multiple diagnoses associated with a health care encounter or multiple customers with a bank account. In these cases, it's unreasonable to resolve the many-valued dimensions directly in the fact table, as this would violate the natural grain of the measurement event. Thus, we use a many-to-many, dual-keyed bridge table in conjunction with the fact table.

Rule #6: Resolve many-to-one relationships in dimension tables.

Hierarchical, fixed-depth many-to-one (M:1) relationships between attributes are typically denormalized or collapsed into a flattened dimension table. If you've spent most of your career designing entity-relationship models for transaction processing systems, you'll need to resist your instinctive tendency to normalize or snowflake a M:1 relationship into smaller subdimensions; dimension denormalization is the name of the game in dimensional modeling.

It is relatively common to have multiple M:1 relationships represented in a single dimension table. One-to-one relationships, like a unique product description associated with a product code, are also handled in a dimension table. Occasionally many-to-one relationships are resolved in the fact table, such as the case when the detailed dimension table has millions of rows and its roll-up attributes are frequently changing. However, using the fact table to resolve M:1 relationships should be done sparingly.

Rule #7: Store report labels and filter domain values in dimension tables.

The codes and, more importantly, associated decodes and descriptors used for labeling and query filtering should be captured in dimension tables. Avoid storing cryptic code fields or bulky descriptive fields in the fact table itself; likewise, don't just store the code in the dimension table and assume that users don't need descriptive decodes or that they'll be handled in the BI application. If it's a row/column label or pull-down menu filter, then it should be handled as a dimension attribute.

Though we stated in Rule #5 that fact table foreign keys should never be null, it's also advisable to avoid nulls in the dimension tables' attribute fields by replacing the null value with "NA" (not applicable) or another default value, determined by the data steward, to reduce user confusion if possible.