Have you ever come across a situation where you have to design a dimension that has no attributes except the one explain the dimension itself? I am sure that you have experienced such dimensions and you might have created a table in relational data warehouse for maintaining it. But is it the best way of managing such dimensions?
Assume that you have a fact table that maintains Issues and it is linked with multiple dimensions such as Date, Warehouse and Customer. And you have identified Issue Number as another dimension as there is a requirement for analyzing claims by issue number. You may design your data warehouse as below.
As you see, there are no other identified attributes for Issue Number dimension. Do we have an alternate way of designing it?
This is where we use a dimension type called Degenerated Dimension. Whenever we see such dimensions and we know for sure that it has only one attribute and there will be always a unique value to a transaction in the fact, it is always better to add it to the fact table itself rather maintaining another table. The dimension that is maintained in the fact is called as Degenerated Dimension.
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