Book Image

Snowflake Cookbook

By : Hamid Mahmood Qureshi, Hammad Sharif
Book Image

Snowflake Cookbook

By: Hamid Mahmood Qureshi, Hammad Sharif

Overview of this book

Snowflake is a unique cloud-based data warehousing platform built from scratch to perform data management on the cloud. This book introduces you to Snowflake's unique architecture, which places it at the forefront of cloud data warehouses. You'll explore the compute model available with Snowflake, and find out how Snowflake allows extensive scaling through the virtual warehouses. You will then learn how to configure a virtual warehouse for optimizing cost and performance. Moving on, you'll get to grips with the data ecosystem and discover how Snowflake integrates with other technologies for staging and loading data. As you progress through the chapters, you will leverage Snowflake's capabilities to process a series of SQL statements using tasks to build data pipelines and find out how you can create modern data solutions and pipelines designed to provide high performance and scalability. You will also get to grips with creating role hierarchies, adding custom roles, and setting default roles for users before covering advanced topics such as data sharing, cloning, and performance optimization. By the end of this Snowflake book, you will be well-versed in Snowflake's architecture for building modern analytical solutions and understand best practices for solving commonly faced problems using practical recipes.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Using SnowSQL to connect to Snowflake

Previously, we looked at how Snowflake's Web UI allows users to connect to, manage, and query data stored in Snowflake. In this recipe, you will learn how to install Snowflake's command-line interface (CLI) software and use that to connect to a Snowflake instance. You will learn how to achieve this connectivity and look at the steps and required configurations to query data over that connection.

Getting ready

This recipe assumes you are using a Linux machine and have access to the Snowflake Web UI via a compatible browser. Google Chrome is the preferred browser as Snowflake tests the Web UI extensively against Chrome. Since SnowSQL is the command-line interface for Snowflake, you will need to have command-line access to the operating system with superuser/root/administrative privileges so that you can install any necessary software.

How to do it…

Note that SnowSQL is being downloaded in the home directory of the sfuser...