Month: August 2023

When you’re trying to complete a task for the business, the most important thing is to get the data right. Second most important task is to get the data quickly. One of the ways we can get better at speed is to attempt several slightly different ways that can get you (hopefully) the same data.…… Continue reading Different ways to get to the same thing

When we’re working with fields that have websites in them, one of the things that we should be doing with them is to double-check that they’re well-formed and usable. Thankfully, Snowflake has a function just for that. With the PARSE_URL function, we can check out if everything is properly formed – meaning that we have…… Continue reading Check Out these URLs with Snowflake Functions

Sometimes you need to check one field to see if you want to display another field. Sometimes you show one of two fields depending on the value in yet another field. Sometimes you just need to relax… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxS_DvDiuRI Today, though, we’re going to go thru a myriad of functions that you can use in Snowflake…… Continue reading In CASE You Want to Use Logic in Snowflake

Figuring out the number of years or months between 2 dates shouldn’t be hard. For some reason though, for a lot of database systems it is. Take, for example, SQL Server. If I want to know the number of months between 1/1/2023 and 7/4/2023, it’s not too hard. A simple DATEDIFF function and we’re golden.…… Continue reading Figuring out the Number of Months Between Days

By the title of this post, you’re thinking “Ho hum. Sherpa will tell us about the stupid MIN and MAX functions in Snowflake and how great they are.” Well, they are great. Let’s not kid ourselves about that one. SELECT department_id, MIN(employee_id) AS FirstEmp FROM public.employees GROUP BY department_id ORDER BY department_id; This simply tells…… Continue reading Getting the Minimum or Maximum of One Column