Capabilities

The Snowflake Schema is a data warehouse schema that encompasses a logical arrangement of dimension tables. This data warehouse schema builds on the star schema by adding additional sub-dimension tables that relate to first-order dimension tables joined to the fact table. Just like the relationship between the foreign key in the fact table and the primary key in the dimension table, with the snowflake schema approach, a primary key in a sub-dimension table will relate to a foreign key within the higher order dimension table. Snowflake schema creates normalized dimension tables – a database structuring strategy that organizes tables to reduce redundancy. The purpose of normalization is to eliminate any redundant data to reduce overhead.