The data warehouse tables used to store information about time are described in the following sections. It is made up of ten tables, seven of which are used to store an instant in time and three which are used to store auxiliary data.

The tables beginning with ARF_TIME store data about an instant in time. In essence they provide individual access every piece of data that might be represented in a timestamp. This allows the same report query to be used with multiple databases, which may have different date and time storage. It also improves report performance; for example, there is no need to perform extraction functions on timestamp data to retrieve just the month.