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

From how employees are organized to how customers or products are segmented, hierarchies exist in every organization. By learning how to model hierarchies as business dimensions, organizations can analyze and maintain them as they would any other entity. However, not all hierarchies behave the same way, and learning to understand their differences is the key to modeling them accordingly.

The biggest difference between hierarchies is the degree of variance between their members. Fixed and slightly ragged hierarchies have a set number of levels corresponding to their attributes’ natural grouping. Ragged hierarchies, such as org levels, can vary in depth and the number of branches for each node. Because of their tree-like structure, ragged hierarchies present a challenge for relational databases that rely on a columnar structure.

Using native extensions to standard SQL, Snowflake allows users to easily perform complex operations, such as recursively traversing a tree...