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)

Managing timestamp data

The recipe will provide you with an example of how files containing timestamp data should be managed using the timestamp functions available in Snowflake, as well as how formats are managed for the standard ISO format and non-standard formats. This recipe shall also provide you with some useful examples of how to avoid mixups that may occur if a source system provides inconsistent date and time data, or different zones are involved, as well as how to apply time zones using session.

Getting ready

Note that this recipe's steps can be run either in the Snowflake web UI or the SnowSQL command-line client.

How to do it…

Let's look at some practical examples of common date and time queries and calculations. We shall start with date and time data types, followed by timestamps. We shall investigate how time zones can be handled in Snowflake. In practical scenarios, data is received in text files, which will contain date and time data available...