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

Summary

This chapter discussed how to transition from logical modeling concepts to physical Snowflake objects. During this process, we learned how Snowflake handles tables of near-infinite size by breaking them down into manageable micro-partitions and how these partitions can be clustered to optimize query and DML performance.

After that, we learned how to define attributes by understanding Snowflake’s data types and their properties. Snowflake offers a variety of functions to make working with data types easier and more performant, to say nothing of the powerful options it offers for semi-structured data.

Before diving into individual constraint types, we understood what database constraints are and how Snowflake organizes and enforces them depending on the type of table where they are applied.

We saw why unique identifiers are vital for defining tables and how Snowflake manages this through the PK constraint. PKs help make life easier for database users by helping...