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

Snowflake views

Snowflake views behave like most relational databases; they store a SELECT statement over physical objects as an object in a schema. Storing a SELECT statement as a shareable database object offers several advantages to users of the system:

  • The SELECT statement does not need to be written from scratch each time it is required. This provides time savings and maintainability benefits through reusable modular code for data pipelines and analytics.
  • Consistency in filters and business logic for everyone with access to the view.
  • Views are separate database objects to the data sources they reference and can therefore have different permissions that do not expose all the underlying data.
  • Can select data from multiple sources at once.
  • Always shows the latest data from source tables without having to refresh it (as opposed to materializing the results as a physical table).
  • Zero storage cost as data is not physically copied but read in real time when...