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

RM versus entity-relationship diagram

Recall that an RM can be identified from business-relevant concepts and mapped onto a database schema that includes their attributes, identifiers, and relationships. An entity-relationship diagram (ERD) is a visual rendering of the RM using simple, easy-to-understand semantics.

In the following examples, we will revisit a set of relational entities from Chapter 1, Unlocking the Power of Modeling. In the RM, each of the three entities corresponds to a table identified by a primary key and related to other entities through foreign keys. Just observing the table names or even a data preview does not make it easy to determine these relationships, as can be seen in the following RM:

SUPERHERO
---------
SUPERHERO_NAME|BIRTHPLACE   |SUPERHERO_TYPE|HAS_MASK|
--------------+-------------+--------------+--------+
Ratman        |Gotham Gutter|Accident      |true ...