[Snowflake Quick Tips] How to start data modeling with DBeaver

The “Snowflake Quick Tips” series presents short practical use cases you should be able to complete in 10 minutes or so.

Chances are you already used DBeaver for other databases. The Community Edition is free, and you can instantly get a reversed-engineered ER diagram. This is a 5–10 minutes tutorial to quickly get you started on Snowflake data modeling.

• Copy and paste this SQL database creation script into a new worksheet in your sandbox Snowflake web UI. Chinook is a sample database that I slightly adapted for Snowflake. There is no data imported here, but we may see PK-FK relationships. Select the whole script and run it.
• Download and install DBeaver Community Edition. Launch the app and go to Databases > New Database Connection > Analytical > Snowflake. Customize the popup fields with your own connection parameters:

• Click on Test Connection. The first time you will likely be required to download the Snowflake JDBC Driver (DBeaver is written in Java and all connections go through JDBC). This will all happen automatically. Click Finish if the connection has been successful.
• Right-click on the Chinook — PUBLIC schema node and select View Diagram. An Entity-Relationship diagram will be automatically created: