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You're reading from  Data Modeling with Snowflake

Product typeBook
Published inMay 2023
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781837634453
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Serge Gershkovich
Serge Gershkovich
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Serge Gershkovich

Serge Gershkovich is a seasoned data architect with decades of experience designing and maintaining enterprise-scale data warehouse platforms and reporting solutions. He is a leading subject matter expert, speaker, content creator, and Snowflake Data Superhero. Serge earned a bachelor of science degree in information systems from the State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook. Throughout his career, Serge has worked in model-driven development from SAP BW/HANA to dashboard design to cost-effective cloud analytics with Snowflake. He currently serves as product success lead at SqlDBM, an online database modeling tool.
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The benefits of semi-structured data in Snowflake

Semi-structured data formats are popular due to their flexibility when working with dynamically varying information. Unlike relational schemas, in which a precise entity structure must be known and fixed ahead of time, semi-structured data is free to include or omit attributes as needed, as long as they are properly nested within corresponding parent objects.

Think of the contact list on your phone. It contains a list of people and their contact details but does not capture those details uniformly. For example, some contacts may contain multiple phone numbers while others have one. Some entries contain information such as an email address and street address, while others have only a number and a vague description in lieu of a name (seriously, who is Green Vespa Laura Friend, and who is Laura?).

To handle this type of data, Snowflake uses the VARIANT data type, which allows semi-structured data to be stored as a column in a relational...

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Data Modeling with Snowflake
Published in: May 2023Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781837634453

Author (1)

author image
Serge Gershkovich

Serge Gershkovich is a seasoned data architect with decades of experience designing and maintaining enterprise-scale data warehouse platforms and reporting solutions. He is a leading subject matter expert, speaker, content creator, and Snowflake Data Superhero. Serge earned a bachelor of science degree in information systems from the State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook. Throughout his career, Serge has worked in model-driven development from SAP BW/HANA to dashboard design to cost-effective cloud analytics with Snowflake. He currently serves as product success lead at SqlDBM, an online database modeling tool.
Read more about Serge Gershkovich