Sherpa of Data

Author: Kevin

  • Comparing Email Configuration in SQL Server and Snowflake

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    Today, I want to talk about all the effort that goes into setting up the ability to email in SQL Server and Snowflake. First is our old friend – SQL Server. I’ll leave this one to the experts at Microsoft. As has been the case over the last few years, they have some great documentation…

  • Simplifying Data Masking in Snowflake with Tags

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    In our last post, we discussed data masking and setting it up for specific columns. Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I deal with hundreds of tables with several columns in each on a daily basis that truly need data masking. If I have to go through and set up a masking policy one…

  • Enhancing Data Privacy in Snowflake

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    The premise behind data masking is fairly simple – make it so that only certain people can see the data in a certain column. For example, social security numbers or credit card numbers probably shouldn’t be seen by everyone who has access to your database. I like to set it up as follows: (Obviously, this…

  • The Power of Memoizable Functions in Snowflake

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    If you’ve been working with data for several years like I have – mostly using the SQL language – then I have a term for you that other languages, like JavaScript or Python, have had for a few years. The term is “memoizable” and it means, in a nutshell, to remember. A memoizable function caches…

  • Checking Out The Snowflake Packages

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    When working with one of the many modern computer languages that use libraries, one of the many things to be aware of – as a developer – is the version of the libraries available for your usage. Since there are multiple languages in Snowflake that use libraries, let’s go over how to check out the…

  • When you have a really bad morning in Snowflake

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    This week, I want to talk about something we’ve all done at least once – especially before our first cup of coffee in the morning. Yes, that’s right – dropping tables and databases. So we have our table from last time still existing in our database: We’re trying to get rid of a table from…

  • Getting New and Old Columns to a Table

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    In my last post, we worked out how to change the data type of a field if it already existed and was found to need changing. This time, I want to add a fresh, new column to an existing table. In SQL Server, I would be doing something like the following. This works great if…

  • How to Efficiently Change Data Types in Snowflake for Optimal Performance

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    When working with data, I usually have an idea of what type of data I will push into a field. Sometimes, for whatever reason, it is decided to change the type of data allowed in the field. Today, I want to show how that’s done in Snowflake. I will start out working with a simple…

  • Odd things found when working with data

    Odd things found when working with data

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    Sometimes, you’ll find all sorts of craziness when you’re working with data. Especially if you don’t expect there to be any craziness. Let me show you what I mean by a story of what I had happen just this week. In mapping some data from one database to another, I was asked to do the…

  • Even more Great Queries Using Query History

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    In our last post, we talked about some of my favorite queries I use in Snowflake to see various items of interest – such as finding the worst-performing queries. For today’s post, though, I want to talk about performance tuning. Yes, you read that right. We’re going to use query history to do some fun…