They must quickly respond to customer inquiries regarding order status. They want to know top customer names and phone numbers. They need aggregate sales comparisons to peers in their regions. When they call on new businesses and are attempting to locate a buying agent, they want to ask for the person with the same job title that customers who buy from them have. Attributes Attributes are specific metric qualifiers and are simply represented by columns in the data warehouse.
Attributes conceptually belong to dimensions.
In fact, an attribute makes very little sense unless used in the context of an associated dimension. For each customer, we must store the geographic attributes of resident region, state and city. For each employee, we must know the region the sales staff is employed by. Each attribute is further defined by dimensional characteristics. For example, the customer is further defined by geographic location.