What are the features in Snowflake? How do you implement CDC in Snowflake?

Question

Assisting AI · Accepted Answer

Snowflake is a cloud‑native data warehouse that offers several key features:

1. **Separation of storage and compute** – you can scale each independently.
2. **Zero‑copy cloning** – create instant copies of databases, schemas, or tables without duplicating data.
3. **Time Travel** – query historical data up to 90 days and recover dropped objects.
4. **Continuous Data Protection (CDP)** – automatically back up data to a separate region.
5. **Native support for semi‑structured data** – JSON, Avro, Parquet, XML can be queried with SQL.
6. **Automatic scaling and concurrency** – virtual warehouses spin up on demand.

**Implementing CDC in Snowflake** typically uses **Streams** and **Tasks**:
- Create a stream on the source table: `CREATE OR REPLACE STREAM my_stream ON TABLE my_table APPEND_ONLY = FALSE;` The stream captures INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE changes.
- Create a task that runs a SQL statement to read from the stream and write changes to a target table or a change log.
- The task can be scheduled (e.g., every minute) or set to run continuously.
- Optionally, use Snowpipe for real‑time ingestion of change logs from external sources.

This approach provides near real‑time CDC with minimal overhead and leverages Snowflake’s built‑in change tracking.

What are the features in Snowflake? How do you implement CDC in Snowflake?

💡 Model Answer

🎤 Get questions like this answered in real-time