Sherpa of Data

Author: Kevin

  • Creating Random Data in Snowflake

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    Kevin
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    One of the many things that the business team asks me to do is to create random-ish data. Thankfully, in Snowflake, there are many ways to make this happen. Today, I want to go thru just a few of them. Perhaps the one that most people are familiar with is making Snowflake create a random…

  • Cleaning Up Your Data the Easy Way in Snowflake

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    Kevin
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    I don’t know about y’all but I have to work with dirty data. A lot. When you’re working with dirty data, one of the many things you can run into is that when you try to divide two numbers – you can cause a huge error because you tried to perform a mathematical no-no –…

  • Computing New Columns in Snowflake for fun and profit

    Computing New Columns in Snowflake for fun and profit

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    Kevin
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    Sometimes to make our lives easier, we, as database engineers, can create a table that automatically tells us the answer as we need it – or at least how we tell it we want it. In SQL Server, we create what is called “Computed Columns.” You’ll notice that the “Earned Per Week” column doesn’t have…

  • Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Limits

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    Kevin
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    There is always a lot of fun things you can learn to do with Snowflake. Sometimes they’re even in the places you least expect to find anything even slightly different. Take for example LIMIT. Most of us have written the statement above – or something like it – a thousand times. But, in Snowflake, you…

  • Desperately Seeking Connections by Joining with Snowflake

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    Kevin
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    Today, I want to talk about that fun edge case when you’re having to join a table to itself in Snowflake. Does it happen often? Not unless your architect just hates you. Let’s use the normal pieces of data that everyone uses for this kind of thing – employee/manager relationships. We have our employee table…

  • Finding a Percentage of Rows from a Table

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    Kevin
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    In our last post, we went over one way to get a sample of data. In the end was it right? Heck, no – at least not if we wanted a percentage of rows returned. Now, SAMPLE does work fine if you want a specific number of random rows returned each time. But, let’s face…

  • Questioning the Top Results in Snowflake

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    Kevin
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    One of the things you may have noticed after reading our last post on Top (found here) is that sometimes SAMPLE doesn’t give the answer you want. For example, we can run the same query to get 20% of the table. Remember that this table has 290 rows in total. As you can see on…

  • Having Great Fun with Top in Snowflake

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    Kevin
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    One of the items that we’re asked to do as data professionals is to only take the first few hundred rows from a table. Heck, it’s important enough that I’ve actually already talked about it in SQL Server here and a few other places also listed in that article. I’m sure you’re asking yourself “Sherpa,…

  • Watching Our Changes in Snowflake

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    Kevin
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    For those of you who have seen me speak at an event for SQL Server, you have probably seen my Windowing Functions presentation. (If not, you should – it could be life-changing!) If you’ve ever had the pleasure of working with the row_number function in SQL Server, you will enjoy working with it in Snowflake.…

  • Checking if your XML is actually well-formed

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    Kevin
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    Sometimes you’ll find that you will have XML in your database. This could be for various reasons – from storing the XML after receiving an API response to keeping it in a table because a web developer couldn’t figure out another way to store their data. Sometimes – no matter how much you trust your…