Recent Articles

  • SQL Server: Greatest and Least Functions

    SQL Server: Greatest and Least Functions

    Occasionally I needed to choose the greatest or least value from a set of columns during a project in SQL Server and use that value to make another decision in my logic. For example, choosing the most recent or oldest date. Depending on how the data is modeled, this could be relatively simple and use Read more

  • Snowflake: Getting Started Stored Procedures

    Snowflake: Getting Started Stored Procedures

    I’ve been primarily a SQL Server developer for the majority of my career, but along the way have needed to use a variety of database technologies including Oracle, Vertica, Teradata, PostgreSQL, and several others. A common behavior between them all is the ability to write some flavor of a stored procedure to encapsulate a block Read more

  • Snowflake: Upload to Stage With Snowpark

    Snowflake: Upload to Stage With Snowpark

    So far in this series we’ve uploaded files using the Snowsight UI, which has a limitation of 50mb currently. In my experience, not many data files are 50mb or less (even when compressed). For testing and demo purposes, this shouldn’t be an issue; however, in practice, data engineers need to stage files much larger than Read more

  • Snowflake: Loading Data from Stage

    Snowflake: Loading Data from Stage

    In the previous articles in this series, we’ve created a named internal stage and connected to an Amazon S3 Bucket as an external stage. So now what? We need to load the data from the staged file to a table so that we can execute SQL Commands against the data as needed. In this post Read more

  • Snowflake: Connect to S3 Bucket

    Snowflake: Connect to S3 Bucket

    Create An Amazon S3 External Stage External stages with cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure can be thought of as “windows” from Snowflake to a set of files in an outside location. Like an internal stage, an external stage can be created with just a few lines of code. Read more

  • Snowflake: Getting Started with Stages

    Snowflake: Getting Started with Stages

    One of the most fundamental tools in the toolbox for data developers is loading a data file from a staging, or landing, location into a database. From there the possibilities are endless to transform the data through code to fit your needs. For a lot of developers with on-premises solutions, this takes the form of Read more