A T-SQL Developer’s Snowflake Survival Guide

Dan Bowers

Are you curious about when Snowflake stopped being simply a small part of a weather phenomenon and became a powerful data platform? Worried that your hard-earned SQL Guru reputation will melt away if you try to develop on another flavor of SQL? That’s exactly the situation I faced in 2022 when my analytics team migrated our data warehouse from SQL Server to Snowflake. Learn from my experience as I share my findings about development on the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform, and help to assure you that yes, your SQL skills will indeed transfer to the Snowflake Cloud.

This session will include a high-level overview of Snowflake’s architecture, and how the design differences between Snowflake and other common database platforms affect how we want to query the data for optimal performance. We’ll review functions and features in Snowflake that are not (yet) available in SQL Server, evaluate Snowflake’s options for performance tuning, and look at some of the best quality of life improvements Snowflake has added to the SQL developer’s experience.

Whether you’re a seasoned SQL Server veteran suddenly tasked with learning a new database platform, or a lifelong learner always ready to dive into the next new thing, this session will give you the skills and confidence to get started as a Snowflake SQL developer.