In addition to the fact and dimension tables, data warehouses
store selected summary tables containing pre-aggregated data.
In the simplest cases, the pre-aggregated data corresponds to
aggregating the fact table on one or more selected
dimensions. Such pre-aggregated summary data can be
represented in the database in at least two ways. Let us
consider the example of a summary table that has total sales
by product by year in the context of the star schema of Figure
3. We can represent such a summary table by a separate fact
table which shares the dimension Product and also a separate
shrunken dimension table for time, which consists of only the
attributes of the dimension that make sense for the summary
table (i.e., year). Alternatively, we can represent the summary
table by encoding the aggregated tuples in the same fact table
and the same dimension tables without adding new tables.
This may be accomplished by adding a new level field to each