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

Modeling in reverse

Real-world enterprise operational systems and data warehouses can reach heights of great complexity, especially if they have evolved over many years and absorbed untold numbers of dubious design decisions. Even the standing members of the data team may not be able to explain every detail, let alone a new hire or a business analyst. Fortunately, conceptual modeling can help simplify and visualize existing database landscapes as quickly as it does when starting new ones.

Database modeling tools allow users to take schema definitions as DDL and ingest them to generate a corresponding diagram—a process known as reverse engineering. Since all the table structures and constraints are already defined in the database, generating an ER diagram and visualizing the database landscape can be done in seconds. Because reverse engineering uses Snowflake object DDL, it produces physical models. As physical models contain the highest level of detail of all modeling types...