Normally, you’ll notice that I like to email myself items on a regular schedule so that I am aware of what’s going on in my Snowflake instance. But, that’s not the only way to get data…
If you haven’t had a chance to mess around in Snowflake, there are internal dashboards that you can provide to your users (or just use yourself) so that you can get the latest data.
Today, I want to quickly show a use case for these Dashboards and one way that you can get data quickly and easily in a nice format.
Instead of going to the Worksheets section of Snowflake, I want to goto Dashboards – found here:
Once I get to the Dashboards section, I create a new Dashboard. Snowflake – in it’s no frills way – goes straight for the hard question. What should the Dashboard be named?
I am going to name it Testing for now. Thankfully, I will be able to rename this dashboard – just by clicking on the name of the dashboard in the top left hand section of the screen. I also have a few other options – such as Duplicating my dashboard or completely deleting it.
The main portion of this screen is for showing data to a user, so let’s begin creating some data for users to see!
When I click “New Tile”, I get the following options:
Oh fun! If we use SQL Worksheet, can it do anything I’m used to doing in a Snowflake Worksheet!??!?!
And the answer is yes! Now, for this example, I took the query I created in our last blog post. To get the data on screen, you just need to run the query.
Once you are happy with the results that you see on screen in table format, let Snowflake turn it into a pretty chart (Yes, it allows you to make some modifications to how it shows). And Boom! You’re off to the races with visualizations that can show you cost data quickly.
Now, if you like the Dashboard and think someone else will like it too, then you can share it with them! Now, they will only see the data they have access to – so it may not look exactly the same for them, but they now have access to the same visualization!
And, you can also refresh this data as often as you need. Just hit “Run” to get the data refreshed for you on the fly! On the other side of that, don’t hit “Run” too often or you will get charged for it a lot…
I like to use the Dashboard feature for items that I want to see on an ad-hoc basis or items that I want fairly locked down (since I do have to log into Snowflake to see it). I’m sure other people have other times they like to use Snowflake Dashboards. In the comments, please be sure to tell me when you use Snowflake Dashboards!
Until next time my friends – try to find a reason to use the Snowflake Dashboard feature today!