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

Deploying a physical model

At this point, all the tables, relationships, and properties have been defined and are ready to be deployed to Snowflake. If you use a modeling tool, all the DDL will be generated behind the scenes as adjustments are made to the diagram through a process called forward engineering. While it’s not strictly necessary to use a modeling tool to forward engineer, doing so will make it easier to make adjustments and generate valid, neatly formatted SQL for your data model.

For those following the exercise, the forward-engineered DDL from this exercise is available in a shared Git repository mentioned at the start of this chapter.

With the DDL in hand, pay attention to the database and schema context in the Snowflake UI. Creating a database or schema will automatically set the context for a given session. To switch to an existing database or schema, use the context menu in the UI or the USE <object> <object name> SQL expression. Here’...