Question About Snowflaking

Hi,

I'm fairly new to the world of data warehousing and I have a question about snowflaking. I understand that snowflaking a dimension can reduce the space needed to store certain dimension attributes. However, what would keep a data architect from placing the foreign key to that snowflaked dimension directly into the fact table so that it can be joined to the fact table (in essence avoiding the snowflake design)?

Thanks,
Brian Ciampa

By placing the FK in the Fact table the "snowflaked" table becomes a dimension.

Yes, thanks so much. I understand that is what is happening. If this is a possibility, why might a data architect choose to snowflake the dimension instead of joining it directly to the fact table?

this article explains some cases where it might be better to go with snowflaking:

http://www.kimballgroup.com/html/articles_search/articles2001/0106IE.html?TrkID=IE200106

This is great. Thanks so much for introducing me to this article.