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Star schema

A star schema organises data into a central fact table surrounded by descriptive dimension tables.

Written by Reflective Data experts · updated Oct 5, 2026

The fact table holds measurable events, like orders, and the dimensions describe who, what, where and when. The layout is simple for people and BI tools to query, and fast for warehouses to run.

It remains the most common pattern for analytical data models.

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Data martData modelingDimension

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