Posts

Jeff discusses how to use one of Snowflake's top SQL features, QUALIFY, to effectively filter window function results.

In this deep dive, Jeff covers everything you need to know about using Snowflake Streams for tracking change data capture in your Snowflake tables.

Jeff Skoldberg of Green Mountain Data Solutions unpacks Snowflake's user type property.

Miguel Duarte of Tasman Analytics their top 7 best practices for Snowflake RBAC, based on their experience of designing access control systems for over 20 Snowflake clients.

Ian recaps all 28 announcements and updates from Snowflake Summit 2024, sharing his opinions on their significance and impact for Snowflake customers and partners.

Tomas shows how you can take advantage of Snowflake's event tables feature for structured logging and tracing when building applications in Snowflake.

Ian shares a framework for Snowflake Cost Management based on the learnings from working with over 100 Snowflake customers.

Get up & running in <5 minutes with the Snowflake Connector for Python. Ian covers how the core concepts for working with the Python package then dives into a number of practical, real-world examples.

Learn how you can leverage Snowflake's Access History dataset to audit and understand Snowflake usage.

Understanding the cost of each query in your Snowflake virtual warehouses is critical for cost management. This post provides a detailed overview and working code to help you calculate cost per query.

In this post, Ian explains how to leverage the Snowflake Query History dataset with 9 practical examples.

Jeff from Sync Computing and Ian from SELECT sit down for an hour to discuss Snowflake and Databricks.

A quick guide on how to download the official Snowflake logo.

Tomáš provides a detailed overview of stored procedures, including a wide variety of examples and best practices.

Jovan Saković of Tasman Analytics provides an overview of key concepts in Snowflake access control and explains the different types of roles. Whether you're a Snowflake administrator or data engineer looking to better understand access control, this post is for you.

In this post, Ian & Niall do a deep dive into Snowflake's pricing model and explain the billing for each service.

Snowflake is an incredibly powerful platform, easily scaling to handle ever-larger data volumes without compromising on performance. But, if not controlled, costs associated with this scaling quickly climb. Whether your goal is to reduce the price of an upcoming renewal, extend your existing contract's runway, or reduce on-demand costs, use the strategies in this post to make significant savings.

In this guide, we share 16 proven optimization techniques to maximize the performance and efficiency of Snowflake. Follow these best practices to make queries run faster while reducing costs.

Tomas shares a deep dive into using Snowpipe for continuous data loading in Snowflake, including a discussion on pricing and best practices.

Gary James shares practical lessons and guidance on when and how to use Terraform for managing Snowflake infrastructure based on many years of experience. He includes practical examples, cases where you shouldn't use Terraform, and other important considerations.

In this post, Ian & Niall answer a frequent question posed by dbt users to optimize dbt performance and cost efficiency: how many dbt threads should be used?

A deep dive into how to effectively work with JSON data, and the different functions Snowflake offers.

In this post, Tomas explains how to work with semi-structured data in Snowflake. First, we cover the different types of semi-structured data. Then, we cover how to load it into Snowflake and all the different ways to create your tables.

SELECT is proud to announce our achievement of SOC 2 Type II Certification, affirming our commitment to the highest standards of security and privacy for our clients and partners.

In this post, we cover the most important techniques and best practices for efficiently loading data into Snowflake, with an emphasis on optimizing for cost efficiency and performance.

An overview of the 5 different bulk data loading options in Snowflake and how to choose between them.

In this post Tomáš of Tietoevry does a deep dive into Snowflake native alerting and notification features.

A deep dive into all things Snowflake Tasks. Tomas covers setting up Tasks with dependencies, choosing a compute model and operational considerations when managing Tasks.

Andrey unpacks Snowflake proprietary storage system and covers key concepts such at table versioning, failsafe, time travel and billing.

Ian and Niall share their learnings and best practices on dbt optimization at dbt's 2023 Coalesce conference in San Diego.

In this post Tomáš of Tietoevry does a deep dive into how to set up Slack error noticications for Snowflake Tasks using Amazon SNS.

In this post, Jay does a deep dive into how you can identify unused dbt models in Snowflake by analyzing your DAG and the historical access patterns.

In this post Andrey of Deliveroo does a deep dive into the Merge statement in Snowflake, how to effectively use it, and how it compares to other alternatives.

In this post we provide a deep dive into all Snowflake Summit 2023 announcements, why they matter and which ones we're most excited about.

In the podcast, Niall shares practical insights and actionable steps that organizations can take to effectively manage and reduce their Snowflake costs.

Removing unused tables in your Snowflake account can reduce spend, increase security and improve overall warehouse usability. In this post, we show how to identify tables that have not been accessed recently.

Query timeouts are an important tool for Snowflake users looking to control costs and prevent accidental cost spikes. In this post we’ll cover why they’re useful and how they can be configured.

A comprehensive guide to resource monitors and alerting to control spend in Snowflake.

CTEs are an extremely valuable tool for modularizing and reusing SQL logic. They're also a frequent focus of optimization discussions, as their usage has been associated with unexpected and sometimes inefficient query execution. In this post, we dig into the impact of CTEs on query plans, understand when they are safe to use, and when they may be best avoided.

In this post, we show how you can use query tags or comments to achieve better visibility & monitoring for your Snowflake dbt model costs and performance.

Snowflake query tags allow users to associate arbitrary metadata with each query. In this post, we show how you can use query tags to achieve better visibility & monitoring for your Snowflake query costs and performance.

The ability to use different warehouse sizes for different workloads in Snowflake provides enormous value for performance and cost optimization. dbt natively integrates with Snowflake to allow specific warehouses to be chosen down to the model level. In this post, we explain exactly how to use this feature and share some best practices.

A deep dive into how you can optimize queries involving a range join for up to a 300x performance improvement.

An overview of Snowflake's new SQL syntax which allows users to exclude and rename specific columns when running a SELECT * style query.

The Snowflake Query Profile is the single best resource you have to understand how Snowflake is executing your query and learn how to improve it. In this post we cover important topics like how to interpret the Query Profile and the things you should look for when diagnosing poor query performance.

Snowflake users enjoy a lot of flexibility when it comes to compute configuration. In this post we cover the implications of virtual warehouse sizing on query speeds, and share some techniques to determine the right one.

How to effectively utilize Snowflake’s materialized views to allow your table to have multiple, separate cluster keys.

Pairing query design with effective clustering can dramatically improve pruning and query speeds. We'll explore how and when you should leverage this powerful Snowflake feature, and the three ways you can effectively cluster your tables.

Independently scalable compute and storage is an architecture fundamental of Snowflake. In this post, we’ll be focusing on how Snowflake stores data, and how it can greatly accelerate query performance.

Snowflake's zero-copy cloning feature is extremely powerful for quickly creating production replica environments. But, anyone who has cloned a database or schema with a large number of tables has experienced that it can take over ten minutes to complete. In this post we explore a potential solution.

An overview of Snowflake's unique elastic data warehouse architecture and its three subcomponents cloud: cloud services, compute and storage