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

Putting Physical Modeling into Practice

The modern data warehouse is a fast-paced environment. Multi-source and near-real-time data in Snowflake streams and transforms at the speed that scalable virtual hardware will allow. With potentially limitless computing resources available at trivially low prices, there emerges a tendency to undervalue planning in favor of post hoc adjustment. When this happens, platform and maintenance costs spiral, and suspicion is cast on the platform instead of the data model (or lack thereof).

So tempting is Snowflake’s promise of near-zero maintenance and effortless scalability that many take it as an excuse to perform adequate data modeling before diving in. The Snowflake data platform does indeed live up to expectations (and beyond) when the underlying data landscape is built on a pre-planned data model.

Compared to other data platforms, Snowflake handles much of the database administration on the user’s behalf. However, as this chapter...