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

Database normalization through examples

Normalization was first proposed by Edgar F. Codd, the inventor of the relational model for database management. Codd introduced normalization in 1NF form and later extended it to 2NF and 3NF. Later, Codd, working with Raymond F. Boyce, developed Boyce-Codd Normal Form (BCNF) also called 3.5NF.

As database theory continues to develop, subsequent normal forms have been proposed up to 6NF, following the progression from least to most restrictive. While it is important to understand normalization in all its forms, it is also essential to recognize that typical business scenarios do not require going past 3NF.

To understand how normal forms organize a database and prevent data anomalies, we will run through an exercise of taking a wholly denormalized dataset and running it through the normalization rules required to satisfy each form. The exercises that follow use examples of data from the music industry. But, unlike the wide world of music...