Summary

While a physical model reflects the company’s business model, transformational models typically focus on addressing analytical business questions. Transformational models depend on existing data to perform their functions and, since data grows and changes over time, the object type used to represent the underlying logic may also change. By keeping object names constant, users can make adjustments and pivot between different database objects without breaking downstream processes.

The relationships established in the physical models can inform transformational designs as well as improving performance through join elimination by using the RELY property. Users can track performance to spot potential query issues using the query profile in the Snowflake UI. The query profile is a valuable tool for identifying performance issues such as exploding joins and inefficient pruning.

While transformational modeling is performed on top of the physical model, the two should always...