Attributes as columns

Recall from the previous section that an entity is a business-relevant concept for which an organization wishes to maintain information. Recall that attributes—defined with the business team during conceptual modeling or loaded from existing source data during the ETL process—are properties that describe the entity and are stored as columns. Attributes can be descriptive (such as NAME, ADDRESS, and QUANTITY) or metadata (such as ETL_SOURCE and LOAD_DATE).

The nature of the attribute—whether numeric, string, date, or other—is an essential detail for understanding the business requirement at the conceptual level and selecting the right data type at the physical level. Snowflake offers basic data types found in other databases (such as VARCHAR, DATE, and INTEGER) and less-common ones (such as VARIANT and GEOGRAPHY), which offer exciting possibilities for modeling and working with table contents.

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