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

Creating an ERD from a physical model

As we just demonstrated through the forward engineering deployment process, a physical database model is a one-to-one representation of its relational diagram. This implies that the process of generating a diagram can be run in reverse—from Snowflake DDL to a modeling tool—a process known as reverse engineering. Again, it’s not strictly necessary to use a dedicated modeling tool—many SQL IDEs such as Visual Studio Code and DBeaver can generate Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs)—doing so will offer greater flexibility in organizing, navigating, and making adjustments to your model.

A similar diagram to the one created in the previous exercise can be generated by connecting to our deployed model through a SQL IDE:

Figure 11.4 – Reverse engineering in DBeaver IDE

Figure 11.4 – Reverse engineering in DBeaver IDE

What is evident in this exercise is often overlooked in database designs—the fact that a neat, related,...