Considerations before starting the implementation
When transitioning from a conceptual or logical design, where entities, attributes, relationships, and additional context have already been defined, there appears to be little to do at first glance when moving to a physical model. However, the specifics of Snowflake’s unique cloud architecture (discussed in Chapters 3 and 4), from its variable-spend pricing to time-travel data retention, leave several factors to consider before embarking on physical design. We’ll cover these factors in the following sections.
Performance
Query performance in Snowflake is heavily dependent on the clustering depth of the micro-partitions, which, in turn, are influenced by the natural sort order of the data inserted. Apart from Hybrid Unistore tables, which allow users to enable indexes, there are few performance tuning options left to the user besides sorting data before inserting and clustering. If the data volume in a given table...
