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

Stages

Before data can make its way into tables, it must be loaded into Snowflake using a stage. Stages are logical objects that abstract cloud filesystems so they can be used in a standard manner to load data into Snowflake. There are two types of stages that can be defined: external and internal. External stages can be created on top of a cloud location (for the supported cloud storage services) outside Snowflake and are used to load data from external source systems. Internal stages are created within the Snowflake account and therefore use the storage type of the hosting provider. Internal stages are used to stage files that originate from within the Snowflake account and can not be used to load external data.

Supported cloud storage services for external stages are as follows:

  • Amazon S3 buckets
  • Google Cloud Storage buckets
  • Microsoft Azure containers

The following figure shows the layout of external stages in relation to internal stage types.

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