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by thewhitetulip 1270 days ago
About snowflake, I am really curious. What do you mean by learn snowflake. The way I was told about snowflake is that it's a cloud based data warehouse. Are there advanced properties in snowflake which one has to learn? Or do you mean optimized queries?
2 comments

Snowflake at it's most basic is SQL on cloud vms, anyone comfortable with SQL should feel at home there. That said, there are many Snowflake specific features that may take a bit to become familiar with. Just off the top of my head:

- hybrid RBAC, DAC, ABAC security model - column, row level, and tag based access policies - multi-account organizations - cross-account and region data replication - data shares - external tables and specialized formats (iceberg, delta) - pipes and streams - snowpark API - streamlit integration

The nice thing about Snowflake is that for many use cases it requires little management.

Things you can learn regarding Snowflake, other than the obvious (SQL, and Snowflake specific language extensions to SQL): proper table partitioning, Snowpipe (and the associated cloud messaging pipelines), and query performance tuning. (Complex queries can become a bear; identifying when its your query/partitioning or when its something on the Snowflake back end is challenging.)

There are always new additions to the Snowflake tooling ecosystem since the company is in competition with Databricks and others (e.g., Snowpark with Python).