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

To get the most out of this book

This book will rely heavily on the design and use of visual modeling diagrams. While a diagram can be drawn by hand, maintained in Excel, or constructed in PowerPoint, a modeling tool with dedicated layouts and functions is recommended. As the exercises in this book will take you from conceptual database-agnostic diagrams to deployable and runnable Snowflake code, a tool that supports Snowflake syntax and can generate deployable DDL is recommended.

This book uses visual examples from SqlDBM, an online database modeling tool that supports Snowflake. A free trial is available on their website here: https://sqldbm.com/Home/.

Another popular online diagramming solution is LucidChart (https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/). Although LucidChart does not support Snowflake as of this writing, it also offers a free tier for designing ER diagrams as well as other models such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) and network diagrams.

Software/hardware covered in the book

Operating system requirements

Snowflake Data Cloud

Windows, macOS, or Linux

SQL

Windows, macOS, or Linux

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.