Fact Table

The table that represents quantitative or factual data. For example, in a business, a fact table might represent orders.

A fact table is often located at the center of a star schema or snowflake schema and might also be referred to as the anchor table. It typically has a large number of records and is surrounded by a collection of dimension tables, each with fewer records. The fact table participates in a join with every dimension table. It can contain data but generally contains many join columns (with optional FOREIGN KEY constraints), each of which corresponds to the primary key column of a dimension table.