From the course: Implementing a Data Warehouse with Microsoft SQL Server 2012
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Choosing between star and snowflake schema design techniques - SQL Server Tutorial
From the course: Implementing a Data Warehouse with Microsoft SQL Server 2012
Choosing between star and snowflake schema design techniques
In this section, I'd like to talk about different techniques for designing dimension tables. There's two primary techniques, one is called the star and one is called the snowflake. So again we will look at the Adventureworks DW 2012 database, specifically I am very interested in the database diagrams. The first one I'd like to look at is for finance, and in here we see in the middle of the screen, one fact table called FactFinance, and that is surrounded by five dimension tables. This is a pretty common design to have multiple dimensions reference in the same fact table, and in particular, these dimension tables are not related to one another and not related to other dimension tables. They are very simple. All of the information about a dimension is contained in one table. This is called the star design. If you want to use your imagination, you could say this diagram looks a little bit like a star, and that's where the terminology comes from. It is considered the simpler technique…
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