❄️ Free course

Warehouse & Modeling

Model data so the business asks its question once and gets one answer.

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What you will learn

1. Snowflake: why storage and compute being separate changes everything
   In an old warehouse, more query power meant more disks. Splitting those two apart is the whole reason the modern warehouse exists — and the whole reason your bill is a query-shape problem.
2. Dimensional modelling: facts and dimensions
   Every analytics question is a number sliced by a noun. Facts hold the numbers, dimensions hold the nouns — get that split right and every dashboard is one join away.
3. Star vs snowflake schema
   Same facts, same dimensions — the only question is whether a dimension is one flat table or a chain of little ones. The answer decides how many joins every dashboard pays for.
4. Slowly Changing Dimensions — Type 1, 2, 3
   A driver moves from Standard to Premium. Should last year's rides now show up as Premium revenue? Your answer is an SCD type — and picking it silently is how finance and ops end up with different numbers.
5. Grain: the question to answer before writing a table
   "One row per what?" If you can't answer that in five words, your table will double-count something — you just don't know what yet.
6. Snowflake architecture: storage, compute, services
   Follow one query from the moment you press Run to the moment rows come back, and you'll know exactly which of Snowflake's three layers to blame when it's slow — or expensive.
7. Virtual warehouses, caching, credits — the bill
   Snowflake doesn't bill you for queries. It bills you for seconds a warehouse is awake. Most surprise invoices are warehouses that were awake while nobody was asking anything.
8. Clustering keys, micro-partitions, pruning
   Pruning only works if each micro-partition holds a narrow range of the column you filter on. A clustering key is how you buy that narrowness — and it costs credits every day you keep it.
9. Time travel, zero-copy clones, streams and tasks
   Immutable micro-partitions give Snowflake four superpowers for free: query the past, undo a bad DELETE, copy a 20 TB database in seconds, and know exactly which rows changed since you last looked.

How the course works

• Each chapter is a short book: the basics, the explanation in several ways, the words to know, and a two-minute summary.
• Then you test yourself — quiz, puzzles — and recall it on two different days, so it stays.
• Blinks (one idea per screen), games and a daily plan keep you coming back. It is free.