Data engineering·Modelling for analysis
the row for an order is updated as it moves through picked, packed and shipped, so each stage's date is a column.
Accumulating snapshot
Also calledpipeline fact table, milestone table
One row per instance of a multi-step process, updated in place as the process reaches each milestone. It makes duration questions trivial — time from order to dispatch is a subtraction rather than a self-join — at the cost of being the one fact table that gets updated, which is awkward on append-only storage. It is the right shape whenever the business talks about a pipeline with named stages.