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

Organizing a Snowflake database

The data objects stored by Snowflake—optimized and compressed in an internal columnar format—are not directly visible nor accessible by customers; they are only accessible through SQL query operations. The customer only manages the logical grouping of database objects into schemas and databases. As described in Chapter 3, Mastering Snowflake’s Architecture, in Snowflake cloud architecture, data is shared virtually without needing to be physically replicated. Therefore, unlike traditional database platforms, the database structure in Snowflake is less concerned with the colocation of physical data and more with the logical grouping of objects—allowing for simple discovery and fine-tuning of access controls.

What does this look like in practice?

Organization of databases and schemas

All Snowflake objects are assigned to a schema upon creation and form a logical hierarchy from object to schema to database. This tiered...