Snowflake Database - Tips, Techniques and Cool Stuff

Overview

Snowflake was founded in 2012 and released in late 2014. The company was founded by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski, who, between them, have over 120 patents.

Dageville (PhD) spent 16 years at Oracle as an architect. Cruanes spent 13 years at Oracle focused on the optimization and parallelization layers in Oracle databases including as lead for the optimization group.

Zukowski invented vectorized query execution for databases. His innovation emerged from his PhD research into optimizing database query execution for modern processors.

These three legends have created a company that has currently has 250 petabytes under management, 1,300 partners, over 4,000 customers and $265M in revenue in 2020.

Syllabus

• Introduction to Snowflake
Overview of Snowflake’s history and founders
Key innovations and technologies
Understanding Snowflake's architecture
• Setting Up and Configuring Snowflake
Creating and managing accounts
Security and access controls
Multi-factor authentication setup
• Data Loading and Unloading
Loading data from cloud storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage)
Unloading data to external locations
Best practices for data ingestion
• Snowflake Architecture and Key Concepts
Understanding virtual warehouses
Clustering and partitioning strategies
Data sharing and Snowflake’s unique sharing capabilities
• Query Performance Optimization
Query execution and query plans
Leveraging result caching and query result sets
Techniques for optimizing storage and processing costs
• Advanced Features and Techniques
Time Travel and data versioning
Understanding Fail-safe and data recovery
Using stored procedures and UDFs (User Defined Functions)
• Integration with BI and Data Engineering Tools
Connecting Snowflake to Tableau, Looker, and other BI tools
Integration strategies with ETL tools and data pipelines
Real-time data processing and integration with Kafka
• Security and Compliance
Encryption methods and protocols
Understanding compliance standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA)
Role-based access and network policies
• Monitoring and Managing Snowflake
Using Snowflake’s monitoring tools and dashboards
Cost management and usage optimization
Scalability and handling peak loads
• Case Studies and Real-world Applications
Industry-specific implementations
Lessons learned and best practices from existing customers
Future trends and the evolving Snowflake ecosystem
• Course Conclusion
Summary of key learnings and takeaways
Additional resources and further reading
Q&A and discussion session

Taught by

Randy Minder

Subjects

Business