Inventory Table

Hi All,

I am in the process of building a Data Warehouse and I have a question about what we should do with a particular table in our operations system. There is a table called Item inventory and it stores columns including Serial Number, Location, Stage(the stage of the item is in the manufacturing process such as “in process”, “complete” etc). This table has some 10 million rows and I was wondering whether this is going to be a dimension of a fact table. There are no metrics in this table. There is also a transaction table this tale links to. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Inventory is a fact table, usually a snapshot fact. But that's beside the point. What does the business want you to do with it?

Thanks for your reply, the name of the table might be misleading but there is no facts in this table. The business wants to be able to report on the fields I mentioned above such as where a particular item(serial number) is in the manufacturing process and then there is another transactions table that shows costs etc and the users would also want to see this information. Please let me know if you have any more questions.

Yep, we call those factless fact tables.

So, inventory is a factless fact table. Fact tables record business activity or states. Where an item is in the process is a state. The serial number itself is a degenerate dimension.

Same thing with the cost feed, treat the serial number as a degenerate dimension.