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'Snow flake' is an common data model in many data model design. Many transaction system use snow flake model to store the data effectivly.

But for business intelligence project, It is best that we use the star schema data model for various purpose, but It is also possible to use snowflake data model and we will explain how OBIEE use snowflake as datasource .

We will takes part of the HR example schema which exist in the Oracle database installation as our example. make sure you could access the HR schema and here 's the physical diagram of the HR data source in OBIEE after importing from database into OBIEE physical layer(you should modify the model according to the following graph, the data model should be snowflake or star schema).

With this snowflake model, we could just drap the physical folder 'HR' from physical layer to business layer and then to presentation layer. 

Even with no dimension and hierarchy definition. We could use BI Answers to build query report and tabular table agaist the data model after these simple drag and drop.

You could see how easy to use OBIEE to build some report remembering that we do nothing of defining dimension and hierarchy at all. The salary will roll up to department automatically if we only drag department column and salary column to the right side!

The only nessessary step is to define aggregation rule for the employee measure 'SALARY',  and then We could see the salary amount accumulated for department or country automatically after the aggregation definition!

The only difference between the above report and a real interactive analytic report is the capability of drill down and rollup, which we could use dimension and hierarchy to implement later.

It is possible to build report based on the common snowflake data model without defining dimension and hierarchy at all with OBIEE!