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

Conceptual

Modeling begins long before databases—or even data—enter the picture; it starts with the business itself. A conceptual diagram should be as valid for describing the organization’s operating model as it would be for laying the foundations of its database landscape.

What it is

Conceptual modeling is a process of identifying and visually mapping the moving pieces, or entities, of a business operation. Before going further, let’s establish what an entity is.

Entity: A person, object, place, event, or concept relevant to the business for which an organization wants to maintain information. Examples of entities common to many companies include employee, customer, sale, and item. Entities are typically referenced in the singular and represent the class or type of an object (more on this and the singular versus plural naming debate in Chapter 10, Database Naming and Structure). Entity instances are occurrences of such a class or type:

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