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

Read the functional manual (RTFM)

Snowflake’s technical documentation is among the clearest and most informative I have ever encountered (virtual columns aside). Paying attention to the usage notes and best practices or simply scrolling down the list of available functions helped me elevate my SQL game and discover new features when I first started, and it continues to pay dividends. One such discovery came—putting aside pride—while reading the usage notes for ORDER BY (https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/constructs/order-by). There, I learned about the NULLS FIRST and NULLS LAST keywords and how they override the default ordering of NULL when arranging in ASC or DESC. It’s a feature that has come in handy many times since. Most importantly, it serves as a reminder to check the documentation periodically to help spot new features and functionality.

See the example in the file titled 03_order_by_nulls.sql.