Recently DataOps.live announced our support for Snowflake Snowpark.
Snowflake is known for its performance, scalability, and concurrency. Before Snowpark, users interacted with Snowflake predominately through SQL. Now, customers will be able to execute more workflows entirely within Snowflake’s Data Cloud, without the need to manage additional processing systems.
FUTURE GRANTS, ALL TABLES in the Snowflake Data Cloud (and similar constructs in other databases) are necessary and powerful tools for manually administered databases. However, they have significant downsides in terms of flexibility, auditability, potential information bleeds, Principle of Least Privilege etc. In a DataOps approach all the same convenience is possible, but all of these limitations are addressed.
Following on from IMPERATIVE VS DECLARATIVE FOR DATA. In this blog post, we will look at different ways that the Imperative Approach can be implemented and also give an overview on how a basic Declarative Approach could work.
Let's now consider this in the context of Data and Databases. The most typical example of changing the state of a database is creating a table. We would all initially jump to something like:
Thanks to everyone who attended the Technical Masterclass on CI/CD and DataOps for Snowflake 2 weeks ago. And to everyone who has since watched the recording since.
This series of blog posts builds on our previous set on The Challenges of Repeatable and Idempotent Schema Management:
Over the previous 2 blog posts, we have seen that managing the lifecycle of database objects in an idempotent manner is impacted by the imperative nature of most SQL statements, which require a known initial state for changes to be applied repeatably.
It may appear that most of this should be possible with native SQL statements and indeed some DDL operations in Snowflake are naturally idempotent, whereas others have impacts on data and object state, and some are not idempotent at all. Let’s look at some of the ways SQL tries to help us with this and the problems that remain.
This is the first in a series of blog posts discussing automating the lifecycle events (e.g. creation, alteration, deletion) of database objects which is critical in achieving repeatable DataOps processes. Rather than the database itself being the source of truth for the data structure and models, instead the code within the central repository should define these.
To paraphrase Datalytyx CTO Guy Adams’ words during the recent ‘Say hello to DataOps for Snowflake’ webinar, DataOps is as much a philosophy as it is a set of technologies and tools. And, because it’s a new area, a lot of people are still struggling to get to grips with it.