Snowflake – Page 2

I’m a Snowflake Data Superhero!

5 February, 20228 February, 2022 by Maja FerleNo Comments

I’m so excited about becoming a Snowflake Data Superhero! I first learned about the Superhero program from Kent Graziano’s blog more than a year ago and I immediately thought it would be cool to be a member of this group. At the time, I was still very much a beginner with Snowflake and I knew I had to become more involved if I wanted to join the Superhero program. Compared with other popular on-prem data platforms that have been on the market for decades, Snowflake as a cloud data platform is relatively younger which means that there still aren’t vast knowledge bases of information available to users and developers of the platform. There aren’t many experts out there answering questions, writing blogs, creating tutorials or YouTube videos. This is where Snowflake Data Superheroes come in. We (yes, I can use the pronoun “we” now since I have been officially welcomed to the club) are here to fill the gap. I have been...

Snowflake Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

13 November, 202120 February, 2022 by Maja FerleNo Comments

Snowflake recommends that roles are used for authorizing access to database objects instead of allowing direct access to objects by individual users. Roles may be granted to other roles, and this enables the Snowflake administrator to create access control hierarchies that act as building blocks for creating an overall access control strategy. There is some excellent information out there about Snowflake Role Based Access Control or RBAC for short that can be used as a starting point to learn the basics, such as this document on Snowflake Community and a series of posts written by John Ryan here, here and here. In this post I want to summarize the concepts of role based access control and then point out some additional considerations when implementing it. Here is a summary of best practices when setting up role based access control (RBAC): Define a set of functional roles that will be granted to users according to how they will be using the database, for example...

What is so great about cloning in Snowflake?

9 October, 202120 February, 2022 by Maja FerleNo Comments

When companies move their infrastructure to the cloud, like for example Snowflake cloud where resources are billed according to their actual use, they become more conscious about the costs of storage and compute consumption. Those who are new to the cloud are often concerned about how much it will cost when they run a query or when they create a table instead of a view. It takes time to get used to this type of billing and also to understand the average consumption and the expected cost over time, so that it doesn’t become a day-to-day worry. Features that save costs are welcome in the cloud. One of such features in Snowflake that is not available in other databases is zero-copy cloning. This feature creates a copy of a database, a schema, or a table. The cloned object incurs no additional data storage costs because it shares all the existing micro-partitions of the original object at the time it was cloned....

A few cool SQL features in Snowflake (that are better than in Oracle)

12 May, 202113 December, 2021 by Maja FerleNo Comments

For an Oracle consultant like myself with many years of experience building data warehouses and analytics solutions using the Oracle technology stack, I was naturally skeptical when I was asked to migrate an existing Oracle solution to Snowflake. Just like with any new technology, switching to Snowflake was a learning experience at first. But not to worry, I became a fan of Snowflake soon enough. There are so many cool features in Snowflake, some of them better than in Oracle, that it wasn’t difficult to make the switch to Snowflake. I’m thrilled with the ease of use of everything in Snowflake. All you have to do is to create an account and you are ready to go. There is no installation, no configuration, no figuring out how to get started as there is a web user interface ready and waiting for you when you sign up for your account. The SQL syntax in Snowflake is similar enough to Oracle that I...

SnowPro Core Certification

16 January, 20216 December, 2021 by Maja FerleNo Comments

I'm thrilled that I passed the SnowPro Core Certification exam! It was challenging because to be successful, exam takers must get at least 80% correct answers, which is quite high as compared to other industry exams (edit October 2021: the passing score has since been lowered). Before taking the exam, I wanted to be sure that I was well prepared so that there would be no surprises. In this post I will share how I prepared for the exam and some thoughts about the experience in general. Preparing for the exam The first step when taking any certification exam is to review the exam contents and have an understanding of what is covered on the exam, what types of questions there will be, how many questions and how long it would take. Then study time begins. At the time of taking the exam I had just under a year of experience on Snowflake. Some of this experience was doing exercises on my own and...