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

In this chapter, we have seen how a conceptual model and its accompanying diagram make it easy to visualize an organizational business model and validate it with domain experts against the intended business operations that it is meant to support.

To get started in conceptual modeling, we used Kimball’s DM methodology, which has been used for decades to guide the design of database and warehouse architectures. Kimball uses a four-step method to initiate discussions between the data team and business teams, and domain experts to identify the business processes that an organization engages in.

Once business processes have been identified, we determine their grain or lowest level of detail pertinent to our business. Describing the grain will also help us discover the core dimensions of our business. Plotting dimensions and business processes on a chart, known as the bus matrix, produces an elegant cross-section of our business and lets us transfer its details easily...