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

File formats

File formats can be thought of as templates describing the file types for reading or writing data to a file. A file format defines properties such as the delimiter type (e.g., comma, tab, or other), date/time formats, and encoding (for example, Hex Base64, and UTF-8).

Snowflake provides several structured and semi-structured file formats, such as CSV, JSON, and Parquet, with commonly used defaults. However, users are free to create their own named file formats when loading or unloading files of a specified type. File format properties may also be specified at runtime when using the COPY INTO command.

A description of supported file types and file formats for data loading is available in the Snowflake documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/data-load-prepare.html.

For a complete overview of data loading of all kinds, including streaming, see the guide on the Snowflake website: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide-data-load.html.

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