“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”
The very first sentence in the Bible lays out all dimensions of information:
– the time: in the beginning
– the person: God
– the action: created
– the location: the heaven (the first reference to a place)
– and the matter produced by the action: the earth
Those correspond to the following questions: When – who – what was done – where – what was the target, object or result.
Those are questions we ask when we want to find out what the database should store: data about who did what, where, when and the object/target/product of the action.
When you think more concretely about – say, a sales application or CRM – you get the same categories/dimensions:
– the time: date fields
– the person: a contact
– the action: a sales opportunity, order or a quote
– the location: an account (usually a company or a local branch with specific billing/shipping addresses)
– the matter: products/services sold
Each data goes into their own table, except for time, which usually becomes a table when you want to summarize events per period (week, month, quarter, year) in a data warehouse.
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