Book Image

Data Modeling with Snowflake

By : Serge Gershkovich
5 (2)
Book Image

Data Modeling with Snowflake

5 (2)
By: Serge Gershkovich

Overview of this book

The Snowflake Data Cloud is one of the fastest-growing platforms for data warehousing and application workloads. Snowflake's scalable, cloud-native architecture and expansive set of features and objects enables you to deliver data solutions quicker than ever before. Yet, we must ensure that these solutions are developed using recommended design patterns and accompanied by documentation that’s easily accessible to everyone in the organization. This book will help you get familiar with simple and practical data modeling frameworks that accelerate agile design and evolve with the project from concept to code. These universal principles have helped guide database design for decades, and this book pairs them with unique Snowflake-native objects and examples like never before – giving you a two-for-one crash course in theory as well as direct application. By the end of this Snowflake book, you’ll have learned how to leverage Snowflake’s innovative features, such as time travel, zero-copy cloning, and change-data-capture, to create cost-effective, efficient designs through time-tested modeling principles that are easily digestible when coupled with real-world examples.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1: Core Concepts in Data Modeling and Snowflake Architecture
8
Part 2: Applied Modeling from Idea to Deployment
14
Part 3: Solving Real-World Problems with Transformational Modeling

Expanding from conceptual to logical modeling

In the previous chapter, we used Kimball’s four-step methodology to develop a bus matrix and create a conceptual model based on the recorded information. Details that informed the bus matrix were gathered through workshops and discussions between the data team and experts on the business side, who could elucidate the business’s operational model and create a functional artifact—the conceptual diagram.

The following diagram shows the conceptual model as it looked at the end of the exercise:

Figure 8.1 – The final conceptual diagram from Chapter 7

Figure 8.1 – The final conceptual diagram from Chapter 7

Despite the obvious deficiencies, such as missing attributes and Snowflake-specific object properties, the conceptual diagram did not attempt to add any contextual detail on the functional relationships between the entities, such as subtypes and many-to-many associations.

To uncover the relevant fields that should be added to our model...