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

Ubiquitous modeling

Before defining data structures, we need to understand the business model that generates them. Such a model will make it possible to build a database system aligned with business processes and able to anticipate change. Like seeing a forest for the trees, ubiquitous modeling allows us to see the business for the data.

A business has many layers: from a mission statement that defines a company ethos, to the sales transactions, to the logistics that support them, to the data, metadata, analysis, and more. However, when most people think of a model, they tend to focus only on the data layer—forgetting that, in isolation, the data only tells part of the story.

In reality, the modeling process involves teams across the entire organization, including management, business departments, data teams, and analysts. Everyone in the organization, no matter their technical background or domain expertise, will work with modeling in some capacity (even if it is in the...