Strategy One

Facts: The Building Blocks of Business Data

Facts relate numeric, measurable data values from the data source to the Strategy reporting environment. Facts generally represent the answers to the business questions on which users want to report. Analysts aggregate facts to create metrics that are displayed on Strategy reports. Facts point to physical columns in the data source, while metrics perform aggregations on those columns. The metric values are the answers to analysts' business questions.

What Is a Fact?

In the Strategy environment, facts are schema objects created by and shared between users. The facts you create allow users to access data stored in the data warehouse. Facts form the basis for metrics, which are used in the majority of analyses and reports that users can create with Strategy.

Facts and attributes are necessary to define projects. In a Strategy project, facts are numeric data and attributes are contextual data for the facts. For example, you want to analyze the amount of sales in a certain region during January. In this case, the Revenue metric represents the Sales fact, and Region and Month represent attributes. The project designer creates projects that contain facts and attributes. Users can then use these facts and attributes as building blocks for metrics and reports.

Facts are stored in the data source in fact tables. These fact tables are composed of different columns. Each cell in the columns represents a specific piece of information. When fact information is requested for a report, that column is accessed to retrieve the necessary data. This data is used to create a metric (such as profit) which is a business measure.

Facts are based on physical columns within tables in the data warehouse, as shown below.

Like other schema objects such as attributes, facts are logical Strategy objects that correspond to physical columns and tables. Unlike attributes, facts do not describe data. Facts are the actual data values stored at a specific fact level. A fact entry level is the lowest set of attributes at which a fact is stored.

Creating Facts

While creating facts is a major step in the initial creation of a project, it can often be necessary to modify and create facts throughout the life cycle of a project. For steps, see Creating and Editing Facts.

For conceptual information on facts, as well as some advanced fact design techniques and procedures, see: