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)

Managing context using different utility functions

This recipe provides you with examples of context management by the use of different Snowflake functions. These functions enable the contextual data processing commonly required in ETL.

Getting ready

The following steps explore the various contextual functions available, their intent, and how they may be used in broader processing.

How to do it…

Perform the following steps to try this recipe:

  1. This step elaborates on some of the most frequently used information in contextual processing, which is the current date. Snowflake provides the CURRENT_DATE function, which, as the name suggests, returns the current date in the default date format:
    SELECT CURRENT_DATE();

    A result set showing the output of CURRENT_DATE looks as follows:

    Figure 4.40 – Output of CURRENT_DATE

  2. We can also combine the output of CURRENT_DATE with other processing logic. As an example, the following statement extracts the day name from...