The Syndrome of TMI (Too Much Information) in Snowflake’s Docs

A constant praise I get for — in my Udemy courses about Snowflake — is how I try to describe complex solutions to a problem in the most simple manner.

And yes, this is indeed a habit I created more than 30 years ago, while I worked part-time as a Teaching Assistant at the “Polytechnica” University of Bucharest…

How “Snowflake Quickstarts” May Become …Slow Starts

Don’t get me wrong, the Snowflake documentation is some of the best I’ve seen: well structured and organized, minimalistic and clean, updated frequently. But many of their tutorial samples have a bad habit of mixing-up way too many concepts at once.

I don’t actually complain, because that’s why I got recognized in the past for my blog here on Medium as well. For my clean minimalistic and practical articles, avoiding the TMI syndrome easily found elsewhere. And — unlike so many spammer colleagues from my former Snowflake “Data Superheroes” group — I was not trying just to explain the exact same concept but with different words.

The most complex examples come from their Snowflake Quickstarts portal. I have tremendous praise for those entries otherwise, but many of them are also made unnecessarily complex.