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Lakehouse & DatabricksCarousel · 10 slidesSystem Design Series · Day 16

Snowflake vs Star Schema — when to normalise dimensions

Normalised dimensions reduce redundancy at the cost of joins. A side-by-side comparison with the cases where each wins.

The trade-off I'd flag

On a columnar lakehouse, storage is cheap and joins are not. Star wins by default; snowflake only when a dimension is genuinely shared and genuinely large.

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