An introduction to Snowflake: part 2
- Previous parts: part 1 link
Worksheets
Snowflake provides several methods in Snowsight for navigating to and interacting with your worksheets.
The Worksheets page lets you create, view, and manage your worksheets. It is basically a query editor where you will write your SQL and get results from your data. The UI is very user-friendly and intuitive.
Key features
- Data preview
- Data export
- Query statistics
- Charts
The user also has the option to have many worksheets saved and even share them with others if possible, which helps in data collaboration through the company.
Dashboards
Dashboards are flexible collections of charts arranged as tiles. The charts are generated by query results and can be customized.
While using other approaches you have to store/query your data on one tool and then plot it in another, Snowflake enables you to do both in the same place with a few clicks creating your data visualization. After you run your queries you can save them as charts and then add them to a dashboard that can also be shared with others.
Tasks
A task can execute any one of the following types of SQL code:
- Single SQL statement
- Call to a stored procedure
- Procedural logic using Snowflake Scripting
Runs on a defined schedule, or after completion of a previous task.
Use Cases:
- Keep aggregates up-to-date
- Generate data for periodic reports
- Copy data into or out of Snowflake
Tasks are a great way to schedule a query/report that needs to run frequently, saving time that the user would spend running it manually.
Snowpipe
Enables loading data from files as soon as they’re available in a stage. This makes it available to users within minutes, rather than manually executing COPY statements. The data is loaded according to the COPY statement defined in a referenced pipe.
A pipe is a named, first-class Snowflake object that contains a COPY statement used by Snowpipe. The COPY statement identifies the source location of the data files and a target table.
Data Marketplace
Utilizes Snowflake Secure Data Sharing to connect providers of data with consumers. You can discover and access a variety of third-party datasets, so you can:
- Make those datasets available directly in your Snowflake account without needing to transform the data.
- Join the datasets with your own data.
Reference
Enough for now. Hope it was helpful in your decision of how to work with your data or how to work with Snowflake.
In subsequent parts of this article, I’ll talk about how Snowflake is helping us deliver value/insights to our business.
Up Next: coming soon…
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