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)

Creating a Table user-defined function using SQL

Snowflake provides capabilities for creating UDFs that can be used to extend the system and perform operations that are not available out of the box in Snowflake. Snowflake allows two languages for the creation of UDFs, SQL-based UDFs and JavaScript-based UDFs. Either of the UDF types can return scalar or table results.

In this recipe, we will be walking you through the creation of SQL-based Table UDFs and demonstrating how to call the UDFs in various scenarios. A Table UDF can return multiple rows of data.

Getting ready

You will need to be connected to your Snowflake instance via the Web UI or the SnowSQL client to execute this recipe.

How to do it

We will be creating a series of UDFs to demonstrate the SQL Table UDF capabilities provided by Snowflake. We will start by exploring some of the existing Table UDFs provided by Snowflake and reviewing their output:

  1. Let's start by creating a database in which...