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new Data warehouse for Retail Sales and snowflakes design

Dear all
I will start to create my first data warehouse.
All my work will be with SQL Server 2008 R2, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS

I will start by Retail Sales, I did read the part of retail sales from “The Data Warehouse
Toolkit Second Edition the Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling” for Ralph Kimball

So far the data warehouse structure is clear for me but there are some points I want to clarify.

What is the advantage and disadvantage of the snowflakes? (Example Product and Sub category and the Category) if I didn’t use the snowflake how will I show this data later in the cube.

thanks,
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RamzyNEbeid
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RamzyNEbeid
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1 Solution
 
Ryan McCauleyData and Analytics ManagerCommented:
It just changes how your fact data rolls up in SSAS - when you're building your SSAS project, you can define dimension hierarchies, but some of them will be defined for you if you're using a snowflake layout because Visual Studio will see how the data is supposed to roll up based on your dimensions.

Here's a Technet chapter talking about dimension granularity and how to create rollups, which a snowflake layout makes a little easier:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms166573.aspx
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