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

Joins and set operators

In a database, there are two ways to bring sources of data together: joins and set operators. A join combines rows from two or more tables based on related columns, and a set operator—such as UNION—combines the results of multiple SELECT statements. But, you can also use join on multiple SELECT statements.

An easier way to think about it is that joins combine data horizontally—across related rows—and set operators work vertically. The following example shows how identical records would look in a JOIN or UNION result.

Figure 12.8 – An example of a JOIN and a UNION operation

Figure 12.8 – An example of a JOIN and a UNION operation

JOIN and UNION are just some of the tools at the developer’s disposal. Let’s review all the join and set operators that Snowflake provides and briefly cover some of their use cases.

The following diagram shows the join and set operators available in Snowflake.

Figure 12.9 – Snowflake joins and set operators

Figure 12.9 –...