Book Image

Snowflake Cookbook

By : Hamid Mahmood Qureshi, Hammad Sharif
5 (1)
Book Image

Snowflake Cookbook

5 (1)
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)

Reviewing query plans to modify table clustering

Snowflake provides the option to configure clustering keys for tables so that larger tables can benefit from partition pruning. This recipe will analyze query plans in conjunction with table structures and identify whether a new clustering key will improve the query performance.

Getting ready

The steps in this recipe can be run either in the Snowflake web UI or the SnowSQL command-line client.

How to do it…

Let's start by creating and populating a table in Snowflake. We will simulate data being inserted into the table regularly, resulting in an increased size on disk and an increased number of partitions. The steps for this recipe are as follows:

  1. Create a new database, followed by the creation of a table that will hold the transaction data:
    CREATE DATABASE C6_R6;
    CREATE TABLE TRANSACTIONS
    (
      TXN_ID STRING,
      TXN_DATE DATE,
      CUSTOMER_ID STRING,
      QUANTITY DECIMAL...