Preface

Understanding a technology for analytics is an important aspect before embarking on delivering data analytic solutions, particularly in the cloud. This book introduces Snowflake tools and techniques you can use to tame challenges associated with data management, warehousing, and analytics.

The cloud provides a quick onboarding mechanism, but at the same time, for novice users who lack the knowledge to efficiently use Snowflake to build and maintain a data warehouse, using trial and error can lead to higher bills. This book provides a practical introduction and guidance for those who have used other technologies, either on-premise or in the cloud for analytics and data warehousing, and those who are keen on transferring their skills to the new technology.

The book provides practical examples that are typically involved in data warehousing and analytics in a simple way supported by code examples. It takes you through the user interface and management console offered by Snowflake and how to get started by creating an account. It also takes you through examples of how to load data and how to deliver analytics using different Snowflake capabilities and touches on extending the capabilities of Snowflake using stored procedures and user-defined functions. The book also touches on integrating Snowflake with Java and Apache Spark to allow it to coexist with a data lake.

By the end of this book, you will be able to build applications on Snowflake that can serve as the building blocks of a larger solution, alongside security, governance, the data life cycle, and the distribution of data on Snowflake.