Entities as tables

Before delving into database details, let’s recall the concept of an entity at the business level: a person, object, place, event, or concept relevant to the business for which an organization wants to maintain information. In other words, an entity is a business-relevant concept with common properties. A rule of thumb for identifying and naming entities is that they conform to singular English nouns, for example, customer, item, and reservation.

The obvious candidate for storing and maintaining information in Snowflake is a table. Through SQL, tables give users a standard and familiar way to access and manipulate entity details. As we saw in the last chapter, Snowflake tables come in several flavors, offering different backup and recovery options. Besides selecting a table type that provides adequate Time Travel and Fail-safe, Snowflake tables live up to the company’s claim of near-zero maintenance—there are no indexes, tablespaces, or partitions...