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Glossary
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- Fact Table
- A central table in a data warehouse schema that contains numerical measures and keys relating facts to dimension tables. Fact tables contain data that describes specific events within a business, such as bank transactions or product sales.
- Fastload
- A technology that typically replaces a specific DBMS load function. A fastload technology obtains significantly faster load times by preprocessing data and bypassing data integrity checks and logging.
- Federated Data
- The federated data warehouse approach supports the iterative development of a data warehousing system containing independent data marts.
- FIFO
- A method of posting a transaction in first-in-first-out order. In other words, transactions are posted in the same order that the data producer entered them.
- File Area Networking
- File area networking refers to various methods of sharing files over a network such as storage devices connected to a file server or network-attached storage.
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
- A service that allows you to transfer files to and from other computers on the Internet. Anyone who has access to ftp can transfer publicly available files to his or her computer. Files retrieved from outside sources can contain viruses. All files retrieved from the Internet should be check with a virus protection program.
- Filters
- Saved sets of chosen criteria that specify a subset of information in a data warehouse.
- Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)
- FASB was created in 1973, replacing the Accounting Principles Board and the Committee on Accounting Procedure of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants before it. The FASB is a private body whose mission is to "establish and improve standards of financial accounting and reporting for the guidance and education of the public, including issuers, auditors and users of financial information." The FASB publishes the Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures (GAAP).*
- Financial Consolidation
- The process of consuming data from different financial systems and combining that information through aggregation and consolidation to create financial analytic views and comprehensive financial statements, which are compliant with accounting and financial reporting standards.*
- Financial Integrity
- Refers to compliant and reliable financial data achieved through quality integrated systems and processes, strong internal control, validations to ensure accuracy and conformance with accounting and reporting standards.*
- Firewall
- A combination of specialized hardware and software set up to monitor traffic between an internal network and an external network (i.e. the Internet). Its primary purpose if for security and is designed to keep unauthorized outsiders from tampering with or accessing information on a networked computer system.
- First Normal Form
- The result of normalizing to ensure that every attribute is dependent upon the key of an entity. In practice this is achieved by removing repeating groups and multi-valued attributes and modeling them as distinct entities.
- Folksonomy
- A folksonomy is content organization through social tagging.
- Forecasting
- Provide baseline metrics to support, track and measure the performance of an initiative.
- Foreign Key
- A foreign key is the primary key of one data structure that is placed into a related data structure to represent a relationship among those structures. Foreign keys resolve relationships, and support navigation among data structures.
- Fraud Detection Application
- The process of detecting patterns, trends or correlations in consumer or corporate behavior that might indicate that fraudulent activity is taking place; e.g., identifying potential or existing fraud through analysis and comparison of standard and aberrant behaviors.
- Frequency
- The timing characteristics of the data.
- Functional Data Warehouse
- A warehouse that draws data from nearby operational systems. Each functional warehouse serves a distinct and separate group (such as a division), functional area (such as manufacturing), geographic unit, or product marketing group.
