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

Understanding and distinguishing between hierarchies

A hierarchy is a system in which people, objects, or concepts are organized into a tree-like structure, with each level representing a different category or grouping of data. In modeling, hierarchies can be thought of as a series of descending one-to-many relationships.

At the top of the hierarchy sits the root node, which contains child nodes. Each child node represents a subcategory of the data contained in the parent node and may, in turn, have its own child nodes. This arrangement of nodes and their relationships is often called a tree structure or diagram. If we were to proverbially chop down such a tree and observe it laterally, we would see the hierarchy in its relational form.

Figure 16.1 – A hierarchy seen in a tree (left) and relational format (right)

Figure 16.1 – A hierarchy seen in a tree (left) and relational format (right)

Hierarchies fall into three general categories depending on the variability in their levels. Let’s look at each of these categories...