Why is the snowflake schema a good data warehouse design

Database design for data warehouses is based on the notion of the snowflake schema and its important special case, the star schema. The snowflake schema represents a dimensional model which is composed of a central fact table and a set of constituent dimension tables which can be further broken up into subdimension tables. We formalise the concept of a snowflake schema in terms of an acyclic database schema whose join tree satisfies certain structural properties. We then define a normal form...