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

Entities as tables

Before delving into database details, let’s recall the concept of an entity at the business level: a person, object, place, event, or concept relevant to the business for which an organization wants to maintain information. In other words, an entity is a business-relevant concept with common properties. A rule of thumb for identifying and naming entities is that they conform to singular English nouns, for example, customer, item, and reservation.

The obvious candidate for storing and maintaining information in Snowflake is a table. Through SQL, tables give users a standard and familiar way to access and manipulate entity details. As we saw in the last chapter, Snowflake tables come in several flavors, offering different backup and recovery options. Besides selecting a table type that provides adequate Time Travel and Fail-safe, Snowflake tables live up to the company’s claim of near-zero maintenance—there are no indexes, tablespaces, or partitions...