A descriptif attribute is class attribute that describe a property or characteristic of a dimension.
They are used to label, filter and/or group on.
whereas measures are attribute to aggregate over
Typical attributes for a product dimension :
In a query or a report request, this descriptive attributes are identified by:
For example, when a user states that he or she wants to see dollar sales by week by brand, week and brand must be available as dimension attributes.
The data type is generally discrete but not always. You may find numeric descriptif attribute.
For example: the revenue of last year is a descriptif element even if it's a number because you may want to use it as a filter to retain customers with a certain amount of revenue.
Generally, numeric attribute would have gone through a binning process to transform them as discrete (ie from revenue to top / middle / law revenue customer)
They serve as the primary source for:
The descriptif attributes are used in the following SQL statement:
They are not used in any aggregate function.
The combination of all level of each descriptif attributes forms the grain of a relation (table, query,…).