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

Relationships as foreign keys

Any business can be broken down into a set of entities and their interactions. For example, customers place orders for items provided by suppliers while applying promotion codes from an active marketing campaign—which is still a very narrow slice of what goes on in a typical organization. So far, this chapter has focused on the entities themselves: orders, items, and suppliers, for example. Now it is time to focus on the interactions—or relationships, as they are called in modeling parlance—such as placing orders, providing items, and applying promotions.

When business entities are related, their corresponding tables must have a way to capture the details of the interaction. When a customer orders an item, the order details must capture who the customer is and what items they ordered. Remember, PKs identify a unique record in a table. Therefore, when two tables share a relationship, the PKs of one must be included in the other to...