It’s been four weeks since we kicked off our Nimbus traineeship as the second cohort. With three months to go in our initial training, this seems a good moment to look both back and forward. In this blog I want to go over what we’ve learned and what’s on the schedule next. The blogs written by my coworkers over the past month will feature throughout this post.
Snowflake fundamentals
With our SnowPro Core exams coming up in one more month, we spent a lot of time on Snowflake and its features. Our focus domains so far have been the basic architecture, account access/security, and performance concepts. My coworkers have written introductions to resource monitors, tasks and dynamic tables, which are important features of Snowflake data warehouses. In terms of account access and security this blog on access control provides a good introduction. Finally, when discussing performance and optimization be sure to check out these posts on query acceleration and warehouse scaling.
In short, we learned how to set up a basic Snowflake data warehouse, make use of its proprietary features and keep our data infrastructure both safe and well-optimized. These foundations should scale well when moving onto bigger projects than the example tasks done so far. In the coming month we will switch our focus to data loading, transformations and protection in Snowflake.
SQL and data theory
While most of us have had some experience with databases and SQL before, a lot of it has been self-taught. Writing readable and consistent code with proper documentation is therefore an important part of our training. We went over the use of ERDs to clearly communicate our database structure at different levels of abstraction and got (re)familiarized with the differences between OLTP and OLAP databases.
Our first month cumulated in an exercise where we designed, built and documented a data warehouse for a fictional client. After many smaller challenges this was a nice way to integrate all we learned so far. Equipped now with a common foundation, more of our Nimbus traineeship will focus on larger exercises such as this.
