jargon

Data engineering·Modelling for analysis

one row per thing that happened, inserted and never touched again, and the table only ever grows.

Transaction fact table

Also calledatomic fact table, event fact

A fact table at the grain of an individual business event, written once at the moment it occurs. It is the most flexible shape — anything can be aggregated up from it — and the most expensive to query at scale, which is why aggregates get built on top. Being append-only is its operational advantage: it partitions by time cleanly and it never needs updating in place.

Commonly confused with