Dimension table

In data warehousing, a dimension table is one of the set of companion tables to a fact table.

The fact table contains business facts (or measures), and foreign keys which refer to candidate keys (normally primary keys) in the dimension tables.

Contrary to fact tables, dimension tables contain descriptive attributes (or fields) that are typically textual fields (or discrete numbers that behave like text). These attributes are designed to serve two critical purposes: query constraining and/or filtering, and query result set labeling.