Putting Physical Modeling into Practice

The modern data warehouse is a fast-paced environment. Multi-source and near-real-time data in Snowflake streams and transforms at the speed that scalable virtual hardware will allow. With potentially limitless computing resources available at trivially low prices, there emerges a tendency to undervalue planning in favor of post hoc adjustment. When this happens, platform and maintenance costs spiral, and suspicion is cast on the platform instead of the data model (or lack thereof).

So tempting is Snowflake’s promise of near-zero maintenance and effortless scalability that many take it as an excuse to perform adequate data modeling before diving in. The Snowflake data platform does indeed live up to expectations (and beyond) when the underlying data landscape is built on a pre-planned data model.

Compared to other data platforms, Snowflake handles much of the database administration on the user’s behalf. However, as this chapter...