Data warehouses fail not because of bad data — but because of bad design. Poorly structured schemas slow queries, inflate costs, and force analysts to rely on IT for every report. This program teaches you how to prevent that from the ground up.
Star Schemas to Snowflakes is an advanced-level program designed for data engineers, analytics engineers, database administrators, and platform architects who are ready to build data infrastructure that performs at enterprise scale. Across nine focused courses, you will master dimensional modeling using star and snowflake schemas, normalize and optimize relational databases for query performance, implement Slowly Changing Dimensions, automate checksum validation, provision cloud data warehouses using Infrastructure as Code, architect disaster recovery systems, and manage capacity and cost across multi-cluster environments.
You will work with industry tools and frameworks including SQL, Terraform, PostgreSQL, and Tableau, applying skills in realistic scenarios drawn from production data environments. Every course combines concise instruction with hands-on projects that produce real, applicable artifacts.
By the end of the program, you will be equipped to design, deploy, scale, and govern analytics data infrastructure — with the technical depth and business judgment that modern data teams require.
Applied Learning Project
You will complete projects that mirror real production data engineering challenges. You'll design star & snowflake schema models to support self-service BI reporting in tools like Tableau, create ER diagrams that document complex data relationships, & implement DDL partitioning & clustering strategies to address query performance at scale. You'll build automated SCD2 pipelines to preserve historical data, implement checksum validation workflows to catch transformation errors before they reach downstream systems, & configure database replication for high availability & read scaling. You'll also provision cloud data warehouse infrastructure using Terraform, conduct TPC-DS cost-performance benchmarking, design cross-region disaster recovery architectures with a 15-minute Recovery Point Objective, & produce capacity-planning forecasts from real growth trend analysis. Each project is grounded in the technical and financial trade-offs data engineers face daily in enterprise environments.
