Final answer:
In a typical properly-designed star schema, dimension tables contain relatively fewer records compared to the central fact table. These tables hold descriptive data and their size varies depending on the data granularity and business size.
Step-by-step explanation:
In a typical properly-designed star schema, the number of records/rows in any of the dimension tables is generally significantly less than the number of records in the central fact table.
Dimension tables usually contain attributes, or descriptive information, related to dimensions such as time, location, customer, etc. The number of records in a dimension table varies based on the granularity of the data and the domain it represents.
For instance, a 'Date' dimension table would have 365 records for each year without considering leap years, whereas a 'Customer' dimension table could have thousands or millions of records depending on the size of the business.
It's important to note that a dimension table is designed to be easily understandable and often denormalized to speed up querying time, which involves a trade-off with the size of the table.
The integrity and design of a star schema play a significant role in the effectiveness of data retrieval and analysis in Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehousing scenarios.