To get the most out of this book

This book will rely heavily on the design and use of visual modeling diagrams. While a diagram can be drawn by hand, maintained in Excel, or constructed in PowerPoint, a modeling tool with dedicated layouts and functions is recommended. As the exercises in this book will take you from conceptual database-agnostic diagrams to deployable and runnable Snowflake code, a tool that supports Snowflake syntax and can generate deployable DDL is recommended.

This book uses visual examples from SqlDBM, an online database modeling tool that supports Snowflake. A free trial is available on their website here: https://sqldbm.com/Home/.

Another popular online diagramming solution is LucidChart (https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/). Although LucidChart does not support Snowflake as of this writing, it also offers a free tier for designing ER diagrams as well as other models such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) and network diagrams.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Snowflake Data Cloud	Windows, macOS, or Linux
SQL	Windows, macOS, or Linux

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.