Author: Kevin

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,…… Continue reading Having Great Fun with Top in Snowflake

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.…… Continue reading Watching Our Changes in Snowflake

When you work with data, you’ll probably need to work with dates at least once a month. That is the nature of the beast. Today, let’s compare working with them in SQL Server and Snowflake. I want to focus only on adding and subtracting months when provided with a specific day. In SQL Server, you…… Continue reading Working with Dates at the End of the Month

In Snowflake, you can do something akin to an APPLY, but not. That, my friends, is a LATERAL join. According to Snowflake documentation, this type of join “allows an inline view to reference columns from the table expression that precedes the inline view.” Yes, that’s gibberish. Let’s show what you’re doing. To test this out,…… Continue reading Laterally a new move

Sometimes you have to work with different kinds of data in Snowflake – just like in most databases. Today I want to work with some JSON – the same basic premise works for XML, Arrays, and other variants. SELECT * FROM TABLE(FLATTEN(input => parse_json(‘[3089, NULL, 217]’))); So, first, let’s go thru the parse_json portion. Notice…… Continue reading Flattening out data in SnowFlake

Sometimes, you need to work with tables that have a predefined list of values. You can have these automatically uploaded and refreshed to Snowflake via several means inherent to Snowflake (or any of a variety of methods from PowerShell, R, Python, etc..) But, sometimes, you want a small list of data inherent to a query…… Continue reading Making Baby Tables In SnowFlake

One of those functions that can be helpful – in the right circumstances – is SOUNDEX. If you hop into the Wayback Machine with Sherman, Mr. Peabody, and me, I created a blog post about this very subject – found here. https://youtu.be/pm_1L27JGFg In Snowflake, the SOUNDEX function works exactly the same way: For all the…… Continue reading Sound of Silence in Snowflake

Whenever I say the keyword INSERT in conjunction with databases, we – as data developers – automatically think that we’re going to be putting data into a table (or multiple tables with Snowflake – see here). With Snowflake, that isn’t always true. Now, you’re probably saying to yourself “Sherpa has obviously lost his/her mind. Who…… Continue reading Inserting an Insert into Snowflake

Sometimes, in Snowflake as well as in SQL Server, you’re forced to delete data. Hopefully, you’re not deleting from the main table of a database in Production, but that is definitely one way to wake up in the morning. If you’re only deleting from one table, then Snowflake is like SQL Server in the formatting…… Continue reading Expunging data, the Snowflake way.