Technical overview of what makes Snowflake the best data platform out there — Executive Summary If I had to summarize this article in just a few words… Snowflake is just a great productivity enabler. It increases our productive work, reduces the time waiting around, and makes performance equally available to everyone instead of limited shared asset. At the end of the day, Data Engineers and…

Joins are databases’ “bread and butter”, but can you actually have “too many” joins? TLDR: yes! — Joining tables is one of the most common things to do on a database. Sometimes though, you may need to outer join a long list of large tables which may lead to sub-optimal (slow) execution plans. A common example is where you need to join multiple large tables using common…

Every time I see a “DISTINCT” I ask the same question: Why?? — Humans are funny, we tend to do all sorts of assumptions. One assumption I see again and again, is the concept that “DISTINCT” is some kind of black magic keyword which resolves all your “duplication” issues. What if I told you you’re probably wrong? Not only are you wrong, but…

If you ever got fed up with queries that run for hours… this one is for you! — I started tuning SQL queries very early in my career, being that ETL scripts or business user queries. There was something highly rewarding about taking a SQL query runtime from 10 minutes to 30 seconds, and deep diving into how the database worked, understanding its core query planner behaviours and…

You probably use window functions already… but have you taken them this far? — Window functions are (in my opinion) one of the best inventions in SQL language. Why, might you ask? Using the SQL core language, without window functions, all you can do is compare columns with columns. Yes, it is true you can join tables to themselves, but sequencing rows is still…

Snowflake is just about to release something that looks like nothing, but is kind of awesome! Watch out for Bundle 2021_10. —

Any fresh-out-of-college junior can write SQL that works… but if you want to be a pro, that won’t “cut the mustard”… — “Even bad code can function. But if code isn’t clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code.” [1] A common misconception about coding is that “functionality” is the be-all and end-all: it is NOT…

Some moments in life just stick to your mind forever, like that moment when something changed your whole brain wiring. This article is about one of those moments. — A long long (long) time ago, before I first came across the SQL “coding language”, my strength was pretty much focused on pure programming, and like many other programmers, my brain was wired to think of code in a procedural way: do A, then do B, then do C.

When it comes to security, Snowflake is the most critical data store in your whole architecture. Make sure you get right! — Data leaks seem to be happening more and more often, and as I covered in my recent article (How Safe Is Your Company’s Data? Part1 , Part2), they are also getting extremely expensive for companies. …