Recent Articles

All JSON Snowflake XML
Snowflake, Snowflake,

Best Practices for implementing a Data Lake on Snowflake

Data lakes. An introduction Data lakes are a common and useful design pattern in modern data architecture. Contrary to a widespread belief, data lakes have been around for a long…
Uli Bethke April 20, 2022
Snowflake, Snowflake,

Date Dimension with Global Holiday Calendar

Overview A date dimension is an essential table in a data model that allows to analyze performance more effectively across different time periods. It should be included in every dimensional…
Uli Bethke March 21, 2022
Snowflake, Snowflake,

Canada Postal Code on Snowflake Marketplace

Overview Canada’s postal codes are alphanumeric, like Dutch, Irish, and British postcodes. Canadian postal codes are in the format A1A 1A1, where A is a letter and 1 is a…
Uli Bethke January 25, 2022
Snowflake, Snowflake,

Administrative Boundaries USA

Overview The dataset Administrative Boundaries USA contains border information as polygons about the following divisions of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Island areas (American…
Uli Bethke December 20, 2021
JSON, JSON, Snowflake,

Snowflake vs. Redshift – Support for Handling JSON

ANSI SQL 2016 introduced support for querying JSON data directly from SQL. This is a common use case nowadays. JSON is everywhere in web based applications, IOT, NoSQL databases, and…
Uli Bethke June 22, 2021
Data Warehouse, Snowflake,

Using Virtual Data Marts the right way

Virtual data marts can be a useful design pattern but there are a few things you should know before you use them. Virtual data marts are logical views dimensionally modelled…
Uli Bethke May 26, 2021