The Data Warrior

Changing the world, one data model at a time. How can I help you?

Archive for the category “Data Warehouse”

Do Not Follow…Leave a Trail!

Do not follow where the path may lead…

Go instead where the is no path and leave a trail

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good advice in general.

I am very happy to be working for Snowflake Computing (@snowflakedb) and our CEO Bob Muglia (@bob_muglia) where we are forging the path for Elastic Data Warehousing (#ElasticDW)

We (Snowflakes) had a great time at Data Day Texas (#DDTX16) in Austin over the weekend. I think it is fair to say people are excited to see the trail we are blazing.

Have a great week!

Kent

The Data Warrior and Snowflake Evangelist

P.S. You can find the slides from my Data Day presentation on my LinkedIn profile or at slideshare.net/kgraziano

Better Data Modeling: Customizing Oracle Sql Developer Data Modeler (#SQLDevModeler) to Support Custom Data Types

On a recent customer call (for Snowflake), the data architects were asking if Snowflake provided a data model diagramming tool to design and generate data warehouse tables or to view a data model of an existing Snowflake data warehouse. Or if we knew of any that would work with Snowflake.

Well, we do not provide one of our own – our service is the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse (#ElasticDW).

The good news is that there are data modeling tools in the broader ecosystem that you can of course use (since we are ANSI SQL compliant).

If you have read my previous posts on using JSON within the Snowflake, you also know that we have a new data type called VARIANT for storing semi structured data like JSON, AVRO, and XML.

In this post I will bring it together and show you the steps to customize SDDM to allow you to model and generate table DDL that contain columns that use the VARIANT data type.

Read the details of how I did it here on my Snowflake blog:

Snowflake SQL: Customizing Oracle Sql Developer Data Modeler (SDDM) to Support Snowflake VARIANT – Snowflake

Enjoy!

Kent

The Data Warrior

P.S. If you are in Austin, Texas this weekend, I will be speaking at Data Day Texas (#DDTX16). Snowflake will have a booth there too, so come on by and say howdy!

Snowflake SQL: Making Schema-on-Read a Reality (Part 2)

This is the 2nd of my articles on the Snowflake blog.

In the first article of this series, I discussed the Snowflake data type VARIANT, showed a simple example of how to load a VARIANT column in a table with a JSON document, and then how easy it is to query data directly from that data type. In this post I will show you how to access an array of data within the JSON document and how we handle nested arrays. Then finally I will give you an example of doing an aggregation using data in the JSON structure and how simple it is to filter your query results by referring to values within an array.

Check out the rest of the post here:

Snowflake SQL: Making Schema-on-Read a Reality (Part 2) – Snowflake

Enjoy!

Kent

The Data Warrior

Snowflake SQL: Making Schema-on-Read a Reality (Part 1) 

This is my 1st official post on the Snowflake blog in my new role as their Technical Evangelist. It discusses getting results from semi-structured JSON data using our extensions to ANSI SQL.

Schema? I don’t need no stinking schema!

Over the last several years, I have heard this phrase schema-on-read used to explain the benefit of loading semi-structured data into a Big Data platform like Hadoop. The idea being you could delay data modeling and schema design until long after the data was loaded (so as to not slow down getting your data while waiting for those darn data modelers).

Every time I heard it, I thought (and sometimes said) – “but that implies there is a knowable schema.”  So really you are just delaying the inevitable need to understand the structure in order to derive some business value from that data. Pay me now or pay me later.

Why delay the pain?

Check out the rest of the post here:

Snowflake SQL: Making Schema-on-Read a Reality (Part 1) – Snowflake

Enjoy!

Kent

The Data Warrior

Data Warrior Agenda for 2016

Hard to believe 2015 is almost over.

It was a very busy year for me:

All of that has entailed a lot of air miles! This year I have visited:

  1. Denver (several times!)
  2. Salida, Colorado
  3. Hollywood, Florida,
  4. Raleigh, NC
  5. Charlotte, NC (thanks to Lynn Winterboer for that one!)
  6. San Francisco
  7. Redwood City, California (Oracle HQ)
  8. Austin (drove this one)
  9. Minneapolis/ St Paul (thanks to Redpill Analytics mostly)
  10. Kansas City, Missouri
  11. Portland, Maine
  12. St Albans, Vermont
  13. Stowe, Vermont
  14. San Mateo, California (HQ for Snowflake Computing)

And that was just work related! Family trips took me to:

  1. Galveston (beach!)
  2. South Padre Island, TX (more beach!)
  3. Road trip to Central NY:
    1. Joplin, Missouri
    2. Hannibal, Missouri (Mark Twain museum)
    3. Chicago (to see robots at the Museum of Science and Industry)
    4. Sandusky, Ohio (just to sleep)
    5. Fulton, NY (to see my dad)
    6. Old Forge, NY (summer vacation in the mountains!)
    7. Huntsville, Alabama (NASA Rocket Center!)
  4. Who knows – the year is not over yet!

Speaking in 2016

2016 will be very busy with the new job for sure. I am already booked for a bunch of events. Here they are so far:

Data Day Texas – January 16 in Austin, TX

TDWI Webinar – Dymstyfying Elastic Data Warehousing (with Philip Russom) – January 26th

BIWA Summit – January 26-28 at Oracle HQ

RMOUG Training Days 2016 – Febuary 9-11 in Denver, CO (I have 2 hour deep dive on Feb 9th). Register early for discounts.

Enterprise Data World – April 17-22 in San Diego. Register early for discounts (by the end of the year for the best rate).

ODTUG KScope16 – June 26-30 in Chicago, IL. Register early and be sure to book the hotel!

Also likely speaking at World Wide Data Vault Consortium (WWDVC) – May 25-28 in Stowe, Vermont (TBD)

And many more to come! (watch my twitter feed for updates)

Hopefully I will see you at one or more of these events!

Wishing a safe a joyous holiday season!

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

Kent

The Data Warrior


 

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