Yesterday I attended a free workshop put on by Snowflake. The session entitled “Zero to Snowflake in 90 Minutes” provided information on Snowflake’s Architecture, Performance and Scalability as well as a “hands-on” demo. Snowflake touts itself as “The Data Warehouse Built for the Cloud” and is gaining enterprise customers at a dizzying pace.
The “demo” used data from Citi Bike – New York City’s bike share system. Citi Bike is the nations largest bike sharing service. The data can be downloaded from: https://www.citibikenyc.com/system-data
The workshop provides an introduction to how to setup and use Snowflake. The outline is below and the lab takes 90~ minutes:
Lab Overview
Module 1: Prepare Your Lab Environment
Module 2: The Snowflake User Interface & Lab “Story”
Module 3: Preparing to Load Data
Module 4: Loading Data
Module 5: Analytical Queries, Results Cache, Cloning
Module 6: Working With Semi-Structured Data, Views, JOIN
Module 7: Using Time Travel
Module 8: Roles Based Access Controls and Account Admin
Module 9: Data Sharing
I found the workshop very interesting and for two reasons. First, it covered all the basics of using a cloud based database. Users loaded data from a S3 bucket, parsing both csv and json files. Queried the database and managed schema’s and security. The second reason why enjoyed the session is because Qlik’s Elif Tutuk used this dataset for a Qlik Sense Demo app.
I found a copy of the old Qlik Demo app and set it up on a Qlik Sense instance.
I created a ODBC connection (using a DSN) and was able to update the data from Snowflake. The combination of Qlik Sense and Snowflake is compelling. I liked the Snowflake demo especially when I could match it up with the visualizations from Qlik Sense.
