A while ago I wrote about an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) generator for Snowflake, implemented as a separate proof-of-concept Python project using the Snowflake Connector. While Streamlit in Snowflake is now in Public Preview, let’s see how simple it is to build this project directly within your Snowflake account, as a…

The “Snowflake Quick Tips” series presents short practical use cases you should be able to complete in 10 minutes or so. The step-by-step creation of a Snowflake Native App is presented with great details in the Snowflake documentation. However, if you want a simple starter Python project and to automatically…

Data is frequently organized hierarchically, through one-to-many parent-child relationships. When returned in a tabular format (in most relational databases, Snowflake included), each row is usually identified by a child ID column. Another foreign key column points to parent ID (which acts as identifier of another row). There is always at…

Data lineage is about tracing all data movements, from the origin, at the most granular level — the column level in data warehouses like Snowflake. We want to see what happens to our data, and where it moves over time. Data lineage simplifies tracing errors back to the root cause. Data Lineage Tools …

The Snowpark API Reference for Python looks great. But when you have dozens of classes with hundreds of methods and properties, some class diagrams for the whole object model will help as well. I’ll use a variation of UML here because I like to isolate the methods and properties that…

A while ago, when Snowpark for Python was just in private preview, I wrote about creating a complex query with Snowpark DataFrame, but in Scala. Snowpark is simply a Snowflake library that can be downloaded and used from Scala, Java or Python client applications to push and execute SQL code…

Window functions are not always easy to learn, but here I’ll introduce you to a convenient way to not only understand how offset functions work but to also build interactive queries in Snowflake without typing one line of SQL code. The Offset Functions The standard SQL window functions in Snowflake that return a…

The “Snowflake Quick Tips” series presents short practical use cases you should be able to complete in 10 minutes or so. This is a quick runbook in which getting you up to speed to connect to Snowflake from Alteryx Designer and set up a simple data flow in 10 minutes…

The Principle of Least Surprise is a software design consistency pattern that says that the interaction with an interface or an object should NOT surprise the user in a negative way. Generally speaking, the PIVOT clause in SQL — to create a pivot table (or crosstab) — has NOT been…