Snowflake Schema

ELI5 — The Vibe Check

A snowflake schema is a star schema where the dimension tables are normalized into sub-tables, making the diagram look like a snowflake. Instead of one big 'product' dimension, you split it into product, category, and brand tables. More normalized, less redundant data, but more joins to write. It's the tidy person's star schema.

Real Talk

A snowflake schema extends the star schema by normalizing dimension tables into multiple related tables, reducing data redundancy at the cost of more complex queries with additional joins. While it saves storage and simplifies dimension maintenance, modern columnar databases and compression have reduced these advantages, making star schemas more commonly preferred.

When You'll Hear This

"We chose a snowflake schema to avoid duplicating category data across products." / "Star schemas are usually faster to query than snowflake schemas because of fewer joins."