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

Physical modeling

Chapter 1, Unlocking the Power of Modeling separated the many meanings and applications of the word model, noting how it is used for the physical structure of database tables and the accompanying visual diagram. A physical model contains all the information necessary to construct and deploy the design to a specific database (e.g., Snowflake).

This also works in the opposite direction; many modeling tools and SQL integrated development environments (IDEs) can reverse engineer diagrams directly from the database data definition language (DDL). Reverse engineering lets users generate visual representations of the underlying schema on the fly to help them explore relationships.

How exactly does this conversion work?

What it is

The physical model is a blueprint for deploying a database to Snowflake and the map that holds the technical and operational links that help users navigate it.

The transition from logical to physical modeling is largely systematic...