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 exceptional time traveler

What changed? This a question that’s been asked since the first data manipulation language (DML) operations were performed on a database. While Snowflake’s built-in table change tracking and streams can help answer this question, they are not enabled on tables by default. However, even in Snowflake’s Standard edition, all tables have a default time travel data retention period of one day.

The time travel feature can be combined with the EXCEPT set operator to isolate and compare any changes made. The exercise uses a randomly generated filter when selecting which records to update to make things interesting. The only way to solve the mystery is to use Snowflake’s exceptional time-traveling powers.

The exercise is explained in the file titled 01_exceptional_time_travel.sql.