Transaction Grain

This is the most common type of fact. You would declare the grain of the fact, ie the level of detail and then this is what would be stored. For example you may have a sales_order fact, every time a new sales order a new row would be created in the fact table. alternatively you may have a "monthly_sales" fact. At the end of every month you would aggregate up all the sales that happened in that month and record the single total value.