Modeling Hierarchies
In the previous chapter, we learned about the methods and techniques for exploring semi-structured data in Snowflake. While not everyone works with operational web or app data such as JSON, there is another type of (semi-)structured data that exists across all organizations: hierarchies. Every company operates with hierarchical entities such as org levels (tiers of management and the reporting relationships between managers and employees) or calendar dimensions (rollups of days, months, fiscal periods, and years).
Whether formally maintained or naturally occurring, hierarchies are used within an organization to organize entities into meaningful groups and subgroups to facilitate rollups or drill-downs in data analysis. Besides aiding in the analysis of facts, hierarchies themselves can be examined to help organizations understand how they are structured, how they function, and how they can improve their performance by eliminating operational bottlenecks.
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