Maturing the Snowflake Data Cloud: A Templated Approach to Delivering and Governing Snowflake in Large Enterprises

​This project-oriented book gives you a hands-on approach to designing, developing, and templating your Snowflake platform delivery. Written by seasoned Snowflake practitioners, the book is full of practical guidance and advice to accelerate and mature your Snowflake journey. Working through the examples helps you develop the skill, knowledge, and expertise to expand your organization’s core Snowflake capability and prepare for later incorporation of additional Snowflake features as they become available. Your Snowflake platform will be resilient, fit for purpose, extensible, and guarantee rapid, consistent, and repeatable, pattern-based deployments ready for application delivery.

​When a Snowflake account is delivered there are no controls, guard rails, external monitoring, nor governance mechanisms baked in. From a large organization perspective, this book explains how to deliver your core Snowflake platform in the form of a Landing Zone, a consistent, templated approach that assumes familiarity with Snowflake core concepts and principles. The book also covers Snowflake from a governance perspective and addresses the “who can see what?” question, satisfying requirements to know for certain that your Snowflake accounts properly adhere to your organization’s data usage policies.

​The book provides a proven pathway to success by equipping you with skill, knowledge, and expertise to accelerate Snowflake adoption within your organization. The patterns delivered within this book are used for production deployment, and are proven in real-world use. Examples in the book help you succeed in an environment in which governance policies, processes, and procedures oversee and control every aspect of your Snowflake platform development and delivery life cycle. Your environment may not be so exacting, but you’ll still benefit from the rigorous and demanding perspective this book’s authors bring to the table. The book shows you how to leverage what you already know and adds what you don’t know, all applied to deliver your Snowflake accounts. You will know how to position your organization to deliver consistent Snowflake accounts that are prepared and ready for immediate application development.

​What You Will Learn

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• Create a common, consistent deployment framework for Snowflake in your organization
• Enable rapid up-skill and adoption of Snowflake, leveraging the benefits of cloud platforms
• Develop a deep understanding of Snowflake administration and configuration
• Implement consistent, approved design patterns that reduce account provisioning times
• Manage data consumption by monitoring and controlling access to datasets

​Who This Book Is For

​Systems administrators charged with delivering a common implementation pattern for all Snowflake accounts within an organization; senior managers looking to simplify the delivery of complex technology into their existing infrastructure; developers seeking to understand guard rails, monitoring, and controls to ensure that Snowflake meets their organization's requirements; sales executives needing to understand how their data usage can be monitored and gain insights into how their data is being consumed; governance colleagues wanting to know who can see each data set, and wanting to identify toxic role combinations, and have confidence that their Snowflake accounts are properly provisioned

About the Author

​Andrew Carruthers is the Director for the Snowflake Corporate Data Cloud at the London Stock Exchange Group. Comprising two Snowflake accounts supporting both ingestion data lake and consumption analytics hub, the Corporate Data Cloud services a growing customer base of over 7,000 end users. He leads both the Centre for Enablement in developing tooling, best practices, and training, and the Snowflake Landing Zone provisioning Snowflake Accounts conforming to both internal standards and best practices. This book is the distilled best practices for implementing a Snowflake Landing Zone.

​Andrew has more than 30 years of hands-on relational database design, development, and implementation experience starting out with Oracle in 1993. Until joining the London Stock Exchange Group, he operated as an independent IT consultant. His experience has been gained predominantly through working at major European financial institutions. Andrew is considered a visionary and thought leader within his domain, with a tight focus on delivery. Successfully bridging the gap between Snowflake technological capability and business usage of technology, he often develops proof of concept to showcase benefits leading to successful business outcomes.

​Since early 2020 Andrew has immersed himself in Snowflake and is considered a subject matter expert. He is SnowPro Core certified, contributes to online forums, and speaks at Snowflake events on behalf of the London Stock Exchange Group. In recognition of his contribution to implementing Snowflake at London Stock Exchange Group, Andrew recently received the Snowflake Data Driver award. This category recognizes a technology trailblazer who has pioneered the Data Cloud into their organization.

​Andrew has two daughters, 19 and 21, both elite figure skaters. He has a passion for Jaguar cars, having both designed and implemented modifications, and has published articles for both the Jaguar Enthusiast magazine and the Jaguar Driver magazine. Andrew enjoys 3D printing and has a mechanical engineering workshop with lathe, milling machine, and TIG welder, to name but a few tools, and enjoys developing his workshop skills.

​Sahir Ahmed is a Snowflake CorePro certified developer working alongside Andrew on the Snowflake Corporate Data Cloud at the London Stock Exchange Group. Sahir began investing his time learning Snowflake prior to joining the London Stock Exchange Group. He drew upon his experience with other relational databases such as MySQL and MS Access. Sahir developed a passion for Snowflake by designing a car parts catalog using JavaScript stored procedures and SQL scripts. As Sahir’s skills and knowledge expanded, he dug deeper into Snowflake and within a year he became SnowPro Core certified.

​In his spare time, Sahir also takes advantage of his self-taught skills in both electrical and manual car repairs, working on many brands of cars such as Jaguar, BMW, and Audi, to name a few. He also competes in amateur boxing competitions. Seen as a role model, Sahir supports and encourages youngsters both within boxing and his wider community. His biggest driving factor, and where his most precious time, is his time spent with his wife and two young daughters. They keep his motivation alive and push him to be the best version of himself.