Summary

Snowflake is a true cloud data platform that enables users to run a variety of workloads beyond what a traditional data warehouse can support. It provides essential tools for exploring diverse data architectures, including transactional systems and data lakes. Additionally, Snowflake features support the development of online applications and the management of dynamic data pipelines. Notably, Snowflake allows all these workloads to operate as one unified system, offering centralized analytics, monitoring, and security—effectively collapsing the data stack and reducing the need for data federation.

This chapter delved into several Snowflake objects that extend beyond traditional tables and views. We began with Iceberg tables, which seamlessly integrate an open table format into Snowflake. This integration enables ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel for externally stored data. As a result, teams can work on the same authoritative dataset from multiple...