Snowflake Essentials is a pre-Summit Training Course that has been designed as a first-step for people who want to learn the fundamentals of Snowflake and data warehousing. At the end of your training, you have to pass a test to earn your badge—after which, you can choose a more advanced course from the vast selection of offerings provided through Summit.
What is Snowflake Summit?
Snowflake is a cloud computing-based data warehouse company that was founded in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zucowski.
This year, the Snowflake Summit will be taking place between June 13-16 in Las Vegas. The four-day conference will include keynote speeches, breakout sessions, labs, and plenty of occasions to deal in data and interact with approximately 10,000 other professionals and thought leaders working in the same industry. The price to attend ranges from USD 1,095 to USD 1,995.
Essentials training: Course expectations and prerequisites
The Essentials Courses are extremely interactive, self-paced, and free-for-all. There are no prerequisites to access the learning material—all you need to do is sign up for a 30-day free trial, for which does not require you to enter any payment card information.
The Essentials Training course covers basic tasks like “logging in—switching user roles, and navigating within the WebUI—and moves quickly to creating databases, warehouses, file formats and other objects.” The morning training sessions include short, live demos, interface simulations, hands-on practice questions, and exercises. Meanwhile, afternoon sessions are dedicated to expert presentations and more exercises.
Each lesson is made up of labs and knowledge checkpoints to test your learning, and each course has a capstone project that you can opt to send in to Snowflake experts for review. Users who produce acceptable projects for submission are awarded digital badges that they can then share on LinkedIn.
Data warehouse badge: learning overview
The first badge in Snowflake’s Hands On Essential Series is the data warehouse badge. To earn this credential, users have to first complete all coursework and pass a written exam. They also have to get 90 percent or more on a graded project which includes databases and warehouses, SQL code, and shows that they know how to load and query CSV and JSON data. Other topics covered include user roles and navigation.
The coursework to earn the data warehouse badge is divided into twelve modules, with each module ending with a set of checkpoint questions to test your knowledge. These include the following:
User roles
Learners are made aware of the various roles that a user can be assigned to, and the accessibility and functionality available to each role. They will learn how to apply the Snowflake interface in order to switch roles.
Database (DB) navigation
In this module learners are taught the properties of available Snowflake databases, and learn how to use the navigation ribbon to browse them.
Data exploration
Learners are taught how to browse available tables within a Snowflake database; shown where to find columns and data type information; and taken through how to use SQL syntax to select data.
Creating warehouses (WHs)
Learners are taught how to generate a “warehouse” in Snowflake, and are shown options for clusters and scaling policies.
Making DB objects
In this module learners are introduced to creating new databases, tables, and file formats to allow parsing of a flat-file. They are also taught how to load flat-file data into the Snowflake database table.
Transformations
This module teaches learners how to supplant source data values with the desired destination values (when inserting into a table) using SQL transformation syntax.
WH concepts
This involves clarifying the concept of a Snowflake Warehouse in terms of usage, possible compute sizes and their associated cost (per credit). Learners are also made aware of the different editions available and how the features differ in each edition.
Staging data
Learners are taught how to connect to and browse remote cloud storage accounts like AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage. They are also shown how to query and load file data from a remote cloud storage into a Snowflake table.
Data storage structures
Learners are taught how to distinguish entities, attributes, and values from an ERD (entity relationship diagram) and objects within Snowflake.
Introduction to semi-structured data
In this module learners go through the five semi-structured file formats that Snowflake supports.
Semi-structured nested data
Finally, learners are taught how to use the FLATTEN command in SQL to select nested data once the semi-structured data has already been inserted into Snowflake.
Module exam
The final module is an overall course exam module that consists of 59 questions that test your knowledge from the previous eleven modules.
In order to obtain an official certificate, you have to finish all the modules and then send in a short video showing your work to Snowflake. The process for doing this is provided with the learning materials and is very easy to follow.
