Declare the Grain Before You Trust the Number
Declare the grain of a warehouse table before approving a metric or downstream model.
The first warehouse question is not "what query returns the number?" It is "what does one row mean?" Grain Creates the Contract Grain is the row-level promise behind a table. A table called orders can mean one row per order, one row per order line, one row per shipment, or one row per billing event. Those are different products. When the grain is explicit, uniqueness tests, joins, additive measures, and dashboard language all have a target. Grain Prevents Silent Multiplication Most warehouse trust failures are not dramatic outages. They are quiet row multiplication after a join, distinct counts used as…
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