Speaking Modeling through Snowflake Objects

In its purest form, relational modeling (normalized tables with strictly enforced physical constraints) is most often found in online transaction processing (OLTP) databases. Transactional databases store the latest (as-is) version of business information, unlike data warehouses, which store historical snapshots and track changes in the information over time, allowing for additional (as-at) analysis across a temporal dimension.

However, this does not mean that relational modeling concepts do not apply in an online analytical processing (OLAP) database—quite the contrary. A data warehouse not only replicates existing entities and relations from transactional systems but also needs to manage the added task of conforming dimensions from other sources and joining them together in downstream transformations and analyses.

Another reason to master the common language of modeling is the Hybrid Unistore tables described in the previous...