Data Modeling Showdown: Kimball vs One Big Table vs Relational

Introduction When architecting a data warehouse, one of the most crucial decisions is choosing the right data modeling approach. Like selecting the right tool for a job, each modeling methodology has its strengths and ideal use cases. Today, we’ll explore three popular approaches: Kimball’s dimensional modeling (star schema), the one big table approach, and traditional relational modeling. The Dataset: Understanding Our Example To illustrate these approaches, let’s consider a retail sales system with these core components: