The Comparison of Anchor and Star Schema from a Query Performance Perspective

Today's business environment requires that companies have access to highly relevant information in a matter of seconds. Modern Business Intelligence tools rely on data structured mostly in traditional dimensional database schemas, typically represented by star schemas. Dimensional modeling is already recognized as a leading industry standard in the field of data warehousing although several drawbacks and pitfalls were reported. This paper focuses on the analysis of another data warehouse modeling technique the anchor modeling, and its characteristics in context with the standardized dimensional modeling technique from a query performance perspective. The results of the analysis show information about performance of queries executed on database schemas structured according to principles of each database modeling technique. Keywords—Data warehousing, anchor modeling, star schema, anchor schema, query performance.