The Attributes will provide the level in which a given Fact is stored in the database and which that Fact can be aggregated to. An Attribute could be mapped to one or more columns in a database table. These tables are commonly referred to as lookup tables or dimension tables. However, it could be mapped to any type of table such as Fact tables.

As opposed to the Facts, the Attributes are not directly built from MicroStrategy but from one or more MicroStrategy Attribute Forms. The following diagram helps you to understand how an Attribute is defined in MicroStrategy:

An Attribute form is a characteristic of the same business context. From the previous diagram, we can see that there is an Attribute that has two forms: one is an identification number, and the other is a description. Both columns define the same business context which could be the business region. An Attribute must have at least one form (ID) and could have as many other characteristics as required. For example, the customer Attribute could have the following forms:

• ID
• First name
• Last name
• Suffix
• Prefix
• Nickname