Morningstar Interview Question

What is the difference between a star and snowflake schemas?

Interview Answer

Anonymous

Jul 25, 2017

Snowflake schemas will use less space to store dimension tables. Snowflake schema query is more complex. In the snowflake schema query, we don’t know how deep we’ll have to go to get the right dimension level, so that complicates the process of writing queries. Personally, I would go with the snowflake schema when implementing a data warehouse (to save storage space) and with the star schema for data marts (to make life easier for business users).