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

Maintaining hierarchies in Snowflake

As we have seen, a hierarchy is a grouping of classifications and relationships. It is an adjacent but separate dimension to the entity that it organizes. As a standalone dimension, hierarchies are subject to the same changes in business rules as any master data. However, before we attend to change-tracking, we must get comfortable traversing a ragged hierarchy’s recursive relationships.

Once again, Snowflake has us covered with native features that allow us to easily map out the paths and levels of a ragged hierarchy.

Recursively navigating a ragged hierarchy

You have been put in charge of the pirate frigate Queen Anne’s Revenge. Its logbook shows all crew members, ranks, and direct reports. The details are listed as follows:

Figure 16.7 – A ragged hierarchy contained in the pirate dimension

Figure 16.7 – A ragged hierarchy contained in the pirate dimension

As you review the records, you realize that this list makes it difficult to make sense of the complex...