Two "dimensional modeling” techniques are generally used for modeling the data structures within a data warehouse context.
These are the "star schema” and "snowflake schema” techniques. Both find their roots within the Kimball dimensional modeling techniques.
Properties of the snowflake schemas :
- Hierarchical structure can be visualized
- some tools don’t support snowflakes
- destroys "browsing” speed and flexibility
- more tables
- less storage
- possibly slower generally to be avoided in the context of end-users queries.