What is star schema? Lookup tables?
What is star schema? Lookup tables?
The star schema is a traditional database schema with a central (fact) table (the "observations", with database "keys" for joining with satellite tables, and with several fields encoded as ID's). Satellite tables map ID's to physical name or description and can be "joined" to the central fact table using the ID fields; these tables are known as lookup tables, and are particularly useful in real-time applications, as they save a lot of memory. Sometimes star schemas involve multiple layers of summarization (summary tables, from granular to less granular) to retrieve information faster.
Lookup tables:
- Array that replace runtime computations with a simpler array indexing operation