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

Embarking on conceptual design

Out of all the modeling types, conceptual captures and displays the least amount of detail. This makes conceptual modeling ideal for getting acquainted with a database landscape at a high level and for designing one from scratch. Designing data models is an art honed over many iterations, but where do you begin if you are new to modeling?

Dimensional modeling

In the early 2000s, Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross published the groundbreaking book The Data Warehouse Toolkit, which has persisted for decades as the authoritative blueprint for constructing database designs. Many of the terms, concepts, and techniques described in later chapters of this book trace their origins to The Data Warehouse Toolkit—whose latest edition fittingly carries the subtitle, The definitive guide to dimensional modeling.

To be clear, Kimball’s approach is not the only way to go about creating a conceptual model. The agile-based Business Event Analysis and...