ABSTRACT
Keeping an audit trail of updates to a database is typically considered an information technology function of little interest to owners and users of the data. The database management system on which you implement your warehouse likely keeps one or more log files of transactions that would be used by your support staff if you experienced problems with your implementation at the technical data level. The purpose of loading audit trail facts into your Fact table is to support user query capabilities for the data, over and above those technical issues. There are circumstances where your users will benefit from, or be interested in, being able to query a history of what has taken place in the warehouse updates over time, particularly with respect to information that would be completely lost without some form of audit trail.
