title: Is a star schema a denormalized schema?
body: <p>An OLAP database consists of data in denormalized form. This means data redundancy and this data redundancy helps retrieve data through less number of joins, hence facilitating faster retrieval.  </p>
  
  <p>But a popular design for OLAP database is fact-dimension model. Fact table will store numerical fact-based entries (# of Sales, etc.) while dimension tables will store "descriptive attributes" related to the fact, i.e. details of the customer to which the sale was made.</p>
  
  <p>My question is, in this design, it does not seem denormalized at all, as all dimension tables will have foreign key references to the fact table. How is it different from an OLTP design?</p>