Summary

In this chapter, we demonstrated that Snowflake objects pack a lot of features, even behind familiar ones like tables and views. A table in Snowflake can store more than just the data—depending on its settings, it can also hold months of historical and disaster recovery backups and offer offset change tracking for CDC. Views, likewise, exceed expectations by providing change tracking and automated re-materialization.

We saw how stages mark the entry point for data to make its way from external sources to Snowflake tables. Stages also provide helpful features, such as external table access for reading file contents without copying them to a table beforehand.

Finally, to coordinate incoming data, establish automated ELT pipelines, and streamline CDC, Snowflake pairs tasks with streams to give its users full serverless or managed control—tying stages, tables, views, and all the connective transformational logic together.

Having understood the strengths and...