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

Summary

While a physical model reflects the company’s business model, transformational models typically focus on addressing analytical business questions. Transformational models depend on existing data to perform their functions and, since data grows and changes over time, the object type used to represent the underlying logic may also change. By keeping object names constant, users can make adjustments and pivot between different database objects without breaking downstream processes.

The relationships established in the physical models can inform transformational designs as well as improving performance through join elimination by using the RELY property. Users can track performance to spot potential query issues using the query profile in the Snowflake UI. The query profile is a valuable tool for identifying performance issues such as exploding joins and inefficient pruning.

While transformational modeling is performed on top of the physical model, the two should always...