Sherpa of Data

Author: Kevin

  • The Intelligent Data Warehouse — How Snowflake Meets AI

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    Kevin
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    …and right now, the same goes for AI in your data stack. For the last decade, everyone has been talking about “data-driven decision-making” as if it were some new religion. The problem? Most warehouses still act like a library from 1999. You can borrow the books, but heaven forbid you ask them to summarize themselves.…

  • Complete Guide to Snowflake’s Tag-Based Masking (Now With Auto-Tagging)

    Complete Guide to Snowflake’s Tag-Based Masking (Now With Auto-Tagging)

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    IntroductionIf you’ve followed our site for a while, you would have seen in a previous post how powerful tag-based masking policies are in Snowflake. They let you enforce consistent data masking rules across columns without constantly rewriting logic. But Snowflake hasn’t stopped there—recent enhancements now make it even easier to classify, tag, and mask data…

  • Level Up Your Snowflake Dashboard: Filters Making Audits Less Sucky

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    Snowflake Dashboards can do a lot more than just show pretty numbers. Today, let’s focus on something that every data pro eventually has to deal with—filters that make navigating your dashboards less painful, especially when it comes to everyone’s favorite task: AUDITING. Ah yes, auditing—because nothing says “data dream job” like tracing permissions. Whether it’s…

  • Making Snowflake Flow Better: Cleaner Queries

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    In a recent Snowflake release, a slick new operator quietly entered the scene: ->>. This little guy can make certain query workflows both more readable and more efficient—especially when you’re dealing with multi-step commands like SHOW, LIST, or DESCRIBE. The Classic Way: RESULT_SCAN(LAST_QUERY_ID(-1)) You may already be familiar with the pattern below: Effective? Sure. Readable?…

  • Warehouse Usage by the Hour: Because Idle Resources Still Cost Money

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    In our last few posts, we’ve looked at how to: Today, we’re diving into a different, but equally powerful question: When are my Snowflake warehouses actually running? This can give you some great insight into usage patterns, process timing, and maintenance windows. The Query: Mapping Warehouse Usage by Hour & Day Let’s start with the…

  • Spotting Idle Warehouses Before They Burn Through Your Budget

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    Now that we’ve loaded our Costs Dashboard with all sorts of goodness, let’s take it a step further and make it even more useful. The goal: track unused warehouses to help manage spend and reduce clutter. Step 1: Snapshot the Current State of Warehouses First, we’ll create a table to capture the current state of…

  • Don’t Just Watch Snowflake Costs – Analyze Them with Trend Insights

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    Last time, in Dashboard Dreams and Snowflake Schemes, we talked a little about showing how much Snowflake really costs in a dashboard internal to Snowflake itself instead of having to push it to PowerBi, Tableau, Looker, or a myriad of other tools. This time, let’s take it a step further: instead of sticking with the…

  • Dashboard Dreams and Snowflake Schemes

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    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…

  • Unlocking Insights with Cost Data in Snowflake

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    In today’s blog, I want to do something a little different. I want to walk through a request I had from a user and how it went from “Eh…” to “Bam!” The initial request from a user—yes, this user is in management—was to see the costs for Snowflake each day of the current month. Yes,…

  • Finding Out What’s Going On in your Database

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    Over the last few days, a task that only runs once per day has failed for unknown reasons. First, I’ve thought back on the regular responses to understand why it could have failed. Since this task runs multiple processes, and logging each query seems like overkill, there must be a better way. Well, my friends,…