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)

Examining table schemas and deriving an optimal structure for a table

This recipe walks you through analyzing a table's structure in conjunction with the data it contains and provides suggestions on optimizing the table structure.

Getting ready

This recipe uses a public S3 bucket for a sample file that is loaded into an example table to demonstrate the concepts. You will need to be connected to your Snowflake instance via the web UI or the SnowSQL client to execute this recipe successfully.

How to do it…

We will create a new table with a not-so-optimal structure and load it with sample data. Later, we will optimize the table and load it with the same data and analyze the two tables' storage differences. The steps for this recipe are as follows:

  1. We will start by creating a new database and a table that will hold the sample data:
    CREATE DATABASE C6_R1;
    CREATE TABLE CUSTOMER
    (
      CustomerID VARCHAR(100),
      FName VARCHAR(1024),
     ...