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

The benefit of synchronized modeling

Throughout this chapter, we have seen examples of diagrams describing data models and capturing details that may not have a strict corollary in SQL. By simplifying modeling to its core components—many of which are likely to be understood even by people without a formal background in database design—we ensure that modeling is not confined solely to the database team. As you recall, a model describes not only the database but also the business itself.

Keeping the physical and conceptual models in sync provides another benefit: the model can be viewed at any time at various levels of abstraction because the underlying physical elements remain the same. Users can view the model at a physical level when more detail is needed and flip to a conceptual view if they wish to see it more abstractly.

To illustrate this, the various diagrams in Figure 6.2 are displayed side by side, demonstrating how physical and conceptual elements can be...