With Snowsight, you can create meaningful visualizations from data within your worksheet results in the form of bar charts, line charts, scatterplots, heat grids, and scorecards. Snowsight is Snowflake’s newly-released visualization tool that is within Snowflake. Snowsight is not a replacement for traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools and is meant to avoid the time and license costs associated with building a BI project.
We’ll check out data from DoorDash For Work and some other great sources in Snowsight to showcase its capabilities.
Check out our Meetup video below to watch an overview of this event:
Other Meetups and Events to check out:
Transcript from the Meetup event:
Welcome to another Carolina Snowflake Meetup group event. Today we’ll be using Snowsight to visualize the data and exploring a little bit of the capabilities of Snowsight for our meetup events.
We ask that everyone is respectful of one another, goes on mute and uses the chat instead to ask questions and try to keep them related to the topic as much as possible. Video is optional for everyone and we hope that you will invite a friend or recommend us to somebody next time.
And you can ping us on Twitter at Beta Lake house so all of our meet ups are recorded and are available on YouTube and that channel link can be found in our discussion board at the on meet up. Today we will be covering little bit of a Snowflake refresher discussing Snowsight and some of its use cases and visualizing data in Snowsight and we’ll talk a little bit about our beta program and we can have a little bit of a Q and A and talk about some upcoming events for our Snowflake refresher.
Some of you might be new to Snowflake or thinking about. Going on to Snowflake, perhaps you’re a seasoned veteran and you know lots and lots about Snowflake, which is great, and that’s what this meet up is for all people in various stages of their journey.
But just as I mentioned, that refresher just around the data cloud. The data cloud is, as it says, runs in any of the three popular publicly available clouds azure, Google and AWS. And within there it’s a highly secure way to load your data into a centralized location.
It’s really all about loading your raw data in there. And then from there you can go ahead and transform and manipulate the data as you see fit. And that’s just part of that manipulation. You’re going to have different user groups that are going to need different access to data.
Some of that is data scientists will need access to the raw data or close to raw. And then you have your enterprise users that might be consuming the data Snowflake via an analytic tool such as Looker or Power BI or Tableau.
But you need to govern that data, especially if you think of HIPAA and PII and then at the same time these different user groups. You want to control what sort of end user experience that they have from performance and the type and the amount of data that they see.
Next slide, please. So you think of the different areas as to what is Snowflake self. We talked about some of the different use cases from your executive user group to your data scientist, to your end user community and really everything in between.
And so as much as you land your raw data into the Snowflake, you’re going to transform that either through ETL or perhaps you’re using. Spark and some other technologies, and then you’re going to want to segment that data into the appropriate consumption.
So you’re going to be putting it into data models. You might be building out a data vault into your dimensional model, or you may just be having large data pools that you’re using and having an audience connect to next time I’m on a club.
Hey, Mike, can you hear me? Yes. A little quiet. So if you’re able to turn off your mic or maybe it’s just turn up your mic. Is it better now? Yes, very good. Okay. Hi everyone. So, taking it for Mike.
So, just a quick explanation of what Snowsight is all about and what’s the real value of having Snowsight in your architecture? I think it’s a great tool to kind of visualize your data from the existing Snowflakes architecture onto some form of a UI, some form of easy to run and load UI without having to invest too much in any other external UI, like a Tableau or Looker or Power BI and so on.
And even though it has its own limitations, but it also is a great tool if you want to quickly spin up something, look at data, and they kind of visualize things then and there itself. So just like any UI two, you have the features of a dashboard on Snowsight where you can bring up various different charts based on the kind of data you have.
And I think right after this, light header will give a quick demonstration. Heather, can you pull up this no site dashboard that we have for this demonstration? I’ll just bring it over onto the screen here.
So I think one quick way to access Snowsight is once you log into Snowflake, is it possible for you to open a sandbox system on the site or snoblike sandbox system? Yeah. So if you click on classic console, can you click over there?
That’s the normal traffic console access that you have on snow tech. And once you log into the system, if you just hover to the top right corner over there, you see Snowsight, and that’s one of the ways to access Snowsight.
And once you click on that, it takes you to another console. And then if you go to dashboards on the left, click on Snowflake usage meetup. Then as you see this way, you can access your dashboards that you’ve created.
If you see on the right top, you have something which people with snowblake might be very familiar with, which is a context menu where you can go and choose the role of the user, and then you can choose the warehouse where you want to kind of execute your queries on.
So what we’ve done is we’ve created a few sample dashboards. And then we’ll show you for one of them what the underlying structure looks like. So Heather for the one, which is the top five warehouse by competition cost on the right, can you just go deeper into it?
Yes, the three dots, the Edit query will Chart yeah. Can you just pull this down? If you just click on Query on the left, you can choose your database and your schema from where you expect to pull your data.
And this is like your normal Snowflake query sequel query that you have. You can paste it here. Once you’re done with that, if you click on the Play button header, can you click on the Play button on the right?
That’s where you execute your query. And then what gives you by default is the results table here, which is the output of your query. And then what’s interesting is on the right, if you see you have like quick descriptive statistics which gives you some form of idea of what the data looks like.
So if you go down, it gives you a quick distribution of what the data of your column is and so on. So for each column you have some form of graph presentation here. That’s just to get an idea of what the data might look like.
If we have a normal distribution or any distribution, that’s to get a good feel of the data and so forth. If you look on Chart chart, just next to the results, click on Chart. Yeah. And that’s where you can see the kind of chart you want to pull.
So for example, on the right, if you see you have various options as Chart type, you have the Bar chart header. Can you go and drop down so you can choose to the line Chart, Pass, catapult and so on.
And if you go down in Data, you can choose the kind of columns you want. You can specify if you want which column as the Xaxis and which column as a yaxis and so on. And if you go downhill, you can even choose whether you want a horizontal bar chart or vertical bar chart.
In orientation you can choose a grouping, whether you want a stacked or a normal bar chart and grouping and so on. So even though it has its limitation in terms of how much you can achieve on the user interface, but it’s a great way to kind of quickly spin something up and then have something ready for your presentations and for your analysis and so on.
So I think that is what we want to COVID from a dashboard snowside standpoint. But I think before we go ahead, if anyone has any questions, we can take that now on the chat window, otherwise we can continue.
Yeah, and there’s one way which I forgot to discuss is about the share. So one important thing is that you can share your dashboards with other users from the snow break instance. So people who have accounts in the same snow break instance can also access, edit a view and run your dashboard.
I think if you have no questions, then back to you. Alrighty, well, Heather, before we get going, I just wanted to just maybe level set just real quick in regards to Snowsight that snowstight isn’t meant to be a replacement for your power bilooker tableau analytic tool.
It’s really just to visualize almost in a very raw format of what is your data looked and get some additional insights, but from the number of various features. You shouldn’t say, oh, I can do this in tableau, therefore I should be able to do this in Snowsight.
You shouldn’t make that leap. Obviously, over time, more and more capabilities will be added to Snowsight by Snowflake. Just going in with that understanding, very important to help you get the most out of snowside.
Just getting our presentation back up again. Alright, so we encourage you guys to, if you haven’t yet, start using Snowsight to quickly spin up some graphs and charts that you can use to help make business decisions pretty quickly.
And it’s included in your Snowflake subscription so it’s not anything extra. And you can always let us know if you have any questions or need assistance using Snowsight. And we are AIC G, the developers of the Day Lake House platform data.
Lake House is an ELT tool. It has built in analytics for all kinds of great sources, a data catalog feature, and there’s no code needed, so it’s pretty cool. We encourage you to check out our site and we’ve actually got Snowflake usage analytics that we offer.
Embedded and you can check those out on our site as well. Right now, we are running an open beta program where you can sign up for free and get some cool swag as well as access to the platform, which is pretty cool.
Includes all of these things here the data catalog. You get 10 million rows a month with Snowflake as a target and it’s an open source software. And if you go to our site data lake house IO backslist beta, you will see this form here and you can quickly fill that out and you’ll get some next steps sent to your email.
If anybody’s interested in signing up for our open beta program oops, apparently it’s linked in the presentation. It doesn’t want to go to the next slide. Scared to click again? Let me pause this real quick and go back.
Alright, so if anybody has any questions, we would be happy to answer them right now. All right, well, if you have questions when you start working working in Snowsight, please feel free to ping us on Twitter or send us an email or just a message on the meetup group would be fine too.
And that goes for any Snowflake related questions. We’re always happy to help out. Point in the right direction. All consultations are free and no worries, we’ll make sure you’re heading on a happy path and we’ll work together with you.
Alright, so our next event coming up will be using streamlit to visualize data and kind of comparing and contrasting how it works in comparison to Snowsight and maybe some other visualization tools. Also we will be at Snowflake Summit so if you are going, we would love to meet up for coffee or possibly more.
You can let us know in the chat window or connect with us. And this is Mike’s email right here and you can always send us something in the discussion board on the meet up group as well. You know what, we need to post something on there like this, that way everyone can see it.
And that is the end of today’s event. Thank you guys so much for coming and we hope to see you at our next event on June 23 where we’ll be going over using Streamlit to visualize data.
