Category: Snowflake

Although it is well documented, it shouldn’t hurt to review a few of the basic Snowflake account administration best practices, as I often see in practice that they are not followed consistently. In my experience, there are so many IT administrators that are pressed for time that they don’t bother to create security roles and policies to be followed. To make it quick, they just use the ACCOUNTADMIN role on Snowflake (or an equivalent all powerful admin role on other systems) because it allows them to do anything and everything without having to think about security best practices. Using an admin role for day-to-day tasks is a bad idea Consider this true story. The administrator tries some functionality, and it works. The user (who doesn’t have admin privileges) tries, and it’s not working. The administrator doesn’t believe the user when they report that the functionality is not working, dismissing them as incompetent. This goes back and forth a few times, until someone gives...

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....

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...