Design a star schema for retail analytics (e.g., Adidas). Explain the dimensional modeling choices, SCD strategy, and how you would scale this schema for global multi-currency, multi-region deployments. What are the refresh and storage cost implications?
**Section 1 — The Context (The 'Why')**
The primary challenge for this design in SQL is balancing scale, cost, and reliability. At scale, naive approaches fail: single points of failure cause cascades, schema evolution breaks consumers, and over-provisioning explodes cost. Failure modes include silent data loss from non-idempotent writes, cascading job failures from tight coupling, and operational burden from manual intervention....
The complete answer continues with detailed implementation patterns, architectural trade-offs, and production-grade considerations. It covers performance optimization strategies, common pitfalls to avoid, and real-world examples from companies like Adidas. The answer also includes follow-up discussion points that interviewers commonly explore.
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