Should i use a star or snowflake schema for our data warehouse?

[Paisley.T]

I’m trying to decide between a star and snowflake schema for our new sales data warehouse, and I’m stuck on how much complexity we should build in from the start. Our fact table is pretty straightforward, but the product and customer dimensions have a lot of hierarchical attributes that might need separate tables.

[EleanorJ]

We kicked off with a simple star schema for the sales area and left the product and customer dims fairly denormalized. It made dashboards scream fast, but once product attributes exploded, the ETL got heavy and maintaining the lookups became a chore.

[BrandonLJ]

We split product and customer into subdimensions with bridge tables, then realized a lot of the hierarchies were rarely used in the same query. Maintenance doubled because you chase keys across tables.

[Dennis74]

Honestly, I keep wondering if the real issue is data quality and governance rather than the schema shape. If attributes are inconsistent, any design will bite you. Do you actually need drill-down for every level, or do you plan to rely on BI filters?

[Harper.B]

We tried a middle ground: collapse some hierarchies in the main dimension, put others in smaller lookup tables. Latency improved a bit, but the risk of drift in the hierarchies crept in, so we kept a lot of validations.