- Snowflake – JSON and Semi-Structured Data
Loading JSON without designing a schema first, then querying it as if you had. The colon path syntax, casting out of VARIANT and why forgetting to cast makes strings come back with quotes, FLATTEN for arrays, and the decision that actually matters: when to leave data in a VARIANT column and when to shred it into real columns.
- Snowflake – Snowpipe and Continuous Loading
When a nightly COPY is not enough. Snowpipe with cloud-storage event notifications, how its serverless billing differs from a warehouse, monitoring a pipe that has quietly stopped, and where the newer options — Snowpipe Streaming and directory tables — fit. Includes the notification setup that is the only genuinely fiddly part.
- Snowflake – Loading Data with Stages and COPY INTO
Getting files in. Internal versus external stages, PUT and COPY INTO, file formats as reusable objects, why a hundred medium files load faster than one huge one, and what to do when a row fails — ON_ERROR, VALIDATION_MODE and the load metadata that silently skips a file you already loaded.
- Snowflake – Data Types That Matter
The short list worth knowing, and the three that cause real bugs. Why NUMBER is the only sensible choice for money, why VARCHAR(16777216) costs nothing extra, the three TIMESTAMP flavours and which one to standardise on, and VARIANT — the type that lets a column hold JSON and still be queried with SQL.
- Snowflake – Databases, Schemas and Tables
The object hierarchy and the DDL you will use every day. Permanent, transient and temporary tables and what the difference costs you, views versus materialised views, why Snowflake accepts a primary key and then ignores it, CREATE TABLE ... LIKE and CLONE, and the naming and identifier-casing rules that bite everyone exactly once.