On one hand it is straightforward how to load data into Snowflake, on the other there are some Snowflake data loading best practices one should follow to leverage the architecture most efficiently. This article will primarily focus on ingest testing and scaling, however there are…

What’s the best way to extract data out of Snowflake? I’m unloading it from Snowflake to S3 and am curious of how to maximize performance. An AWS lambda function I’m working on will pick up the data for additional processing. Single File Extract The test…

No surprise, it was bound to happen – retailers competing against Amazon certainly aren’t keen on the idea of giving Amazon money for their computing services! Snowflake was recently announced as available on the Microsoft Azure platform and is no longer exclusive only to the…

Snowflake Clustering Keys seem to have been a more recently introduced, but extremely powerful, feature of the Snowflake database. They’re a simple feature with a large impact on query tuning and run-time query performance, particularly during scans. There’s a clever concept in Netezza called zone…

Snowflake is a database built from scratch from the cloud – as a result, unlike others that were not, they were able to start without the burden of any traditional architecture and make the best no compromise decisions in designing the Snowflake architecture. This is…

I’ve read that Snowflake clustering helps improve join speeds, although I’m not sure how just being in order would make that the case exactly. I’m going to try some tables to get a decent demonstrable fact-dimension join; sf1000 lineitem (6 billion rows, 169 GB) and…

In 2006, I was invited into a meeting room at AC Nielsen where I was consulting at the time. Nielsen had just purchased their first Netezza system. I believe Mark Jeske was Netezza’s first sales engineer, a role I would later play myself at IBM….