Opinion — Are Classical OLAP Structures still relevant?
What is a Snowflake Schema?
And What are the Differences to a Star Schema?
In this article, you will get to know what a Snowflake Schema is, what the difference to a Star Schema[1] is and the most important facts.
Snowflake Schema in a Nutshell
The snowflake schema is an extension of the star schema used in OLAP and Data Warehouse Architectures. In the star schema, the dimension tables are denormalized, which results in better processing speed at the expense of data integrity and storage space. In contrast, the Snowflake Schema refines the individual dimension tables by classifying or normalizing them. This further branching of the data model creates the shape of a snowflake, which is where the name of this design pattern comes from[2].
An example for that can be seen above. Here for example, the table address is normalized into two dimension tables namely address and country while working in a Star Schema you would probably put address and county data into one dimension table.
