Snowflake Schema - Common Uses

Common Uses

Star and snowflake schemas are most commonly found in dimensional data warehouses and data marts where speed of data retrieval is more important than the efficiency of data manipulations. As such, the tables in these schemas are not normalized much, and are frequently designed at a level of normalization short of third normal form.

Deciding whether to employ a star schema or a snowflake schema should involve considering the relative strengths of the database platform in question and the query tool to be employed. Star schemas should be favored with query tools that largely expose users to the underlying table structures, and in environments where most queries are simpler in nature. Snowflake schemas are often better with more sophisticated query tools that create a layer of abstraction between the users and raw table structures for environments having numerous queries with complex criteria.