What are Facts?

Facts are a little tricky. This first thing to understand is that facts and dimensions work together as a pair for reporting. Think of the fact as the verb or the action in an analytic, and the dimensions as the nouns.

You can have a collection of things, but without doing something with them, they are just there to look at. Same with dimensions, sure you can go into the subject area editor, and expand all the folders and look at the columns. You can drag a column onto the editor and view row after row of data. But, if you want to analyze the data, you need a way to measure it. You need to count it, compare it, sum it up, average it over time or perform any other operation necessary to get the insights you want.

Keep in mind that all dimensions need a fact, at least one fact. Facts give meaning and purpose to your analysis. Don't build analytics without a fact, especially if you have more than one dimension because this leads to unpredictable results.