Summary

From how employees are organized to how customers or products are segmented, hierarchies exist in every organization. By learning how to model hierarchies as business dimensions, organizations can analyze and maintain them as they would any other entity. However, not all hierarchies behave the same way, and learning to understand their differences is the key to modeling them accordingly.

The biggest difference between hierarchies is the degree of variance between their members. Fixed and slightly ragged hierarchies have a set number of levels corresponding to their attributes’ natural grouping. Ragged hierarchies, such as org levels, can vary in depth and the number of branches for each node. Because of their tree-like structure, ragged hierarchies present a challenge for relational databases that rely on a columnar structure.

Using native extensions to standard SQL, Snowflake allows users to easily perform complex operations, such as recursively traversing a tree...