Snowflake Web User Interface
This article is a walkthrough of the Snowflake Web User Interface (UI).
Snowflake has an easy to navigate user experience. The menu ribbon contains ten items. Databases, Shares, Data Marketplace, Warehouses, Worksheets, History, Preview App, Partner Connect, Help and the User menu.
Let us briefly consider each in turn.
Click the User menu to change passwords, set login preferences or log out. If a user has been assigned multiple roles (ACCOUNT ADMIN, SYSADMIN, PUBLIC etc.), roles can be switched here. This is important because Snowflake implements security through roles. Roles control objects in the system a user has been granted privileges to access.
The Help menu provides access to Snowflake documentation, the support portal and offers contextual help for each page.
Partner Connect is where account administrators integrate Snowflake with selected third-party solutions, such as Alteryx and Fivetran among others. The Preview App is a glimpse into the future with a sleek, modern interface on which many of the most common tasks available in the Classic Console can also be executed.
The History page displays all SQL commands executed in the past 14 days, including commands executed using the command line interface, and by others on the same Snowflake account. Filter the list using the filters provided. Click a query ID to examine the details of a particular query or select the profile tab for a graphical representation of the stages the query went through.
The Worksheet page provides an interactive UI for executing SQL queries and performing other standard data definition language (DDL) and data manipulation language (DML) operations. Multiple worksheets can be created to organise different workstreams. Each worksheet has a separate context. To get started, choose a warehouse to designate the compute resources to use for queries executed in that worksheet. Now write queries and execute them using the warehouse selected for that worksheet. The worksheet maintains the results of each query executed in the current session, as well as detailed query information such as duration and start time. The results of a query can be copied or downloaded to a delimited text file.
Next, let us turn to the Warehouses menu. What is a Snowflake warehouse? A Snowflake warehouse is one or more clusters of servers that provide the compute resources to execute queries and perform DML operations, including bulk data loading. With multiple warehouses resource-intensive tasks such as querying, and data loading can be executed separately. Query workloads can also be isolated from others. Warehouses can be resized (they come in standard t-shirt sizes X-Small, Small, Medium, etc.) at any time to improve performance. This is also where warehouses can be dropped (not literally as it is, after all, in the cloud).
The Snowflake Data Marketplace is where external data from approved data providers can be mined to drive new insights. Suppose you are an ice-cream vendor who would like to augment sales data with weather patterns to understand the correlation between them. The Data Marketplace offers localised forecasts to make more informed weather-impacted decisions.
The Shares tab enables users to consume data within an organisation and provides a convenient method to share data with non-Snowflake users.
That brings us finally to databases. All data in Snowflake is stored in databases. A database is a logical grouping of objects such as tables and views organised into schemas. The Databases page displays information about databases a user has created or has privileges to access. New databases can be created, an existing database cloned, dropped, or ownership transferred to a different role.
That concludes this whistle-stop tour of the Snowflake Web UI, which is centred around a Menu ribbon (subject to change as the platform evolves) of 10 items.