Snowflake: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 11. Visualizing Data in Snowsight

Data visualization makes it much easier to identify trends, patterns, and outliers and to discover insights within complex data. Information displayed in a visual context, such as a graph or a map, is a more natural way for the human mind to comprehend large amounts of data. Business intelligence (BI) tools such as Domo, Power BI, Sisense, Sigma, Tableau, and ThoughtSpot are used in this way for corporate reporting and for building complex dashboards in which many users are consumers of a particular dashboard.

Sometimes individuals or small groups of users in an organization simply need to undertake ad hoc data analysis, perform data validation while loading data, or quickly create minor charts and dashboards that can be shared and explored together as a team. For those use cases, Snowflake’s Snowsight visualization tools are great choices. Snowsight visualization tools include automatic statistics with interactive results and dashboards with chart tiles.

Before we dive into Snowsight’s visualization tools, we need to discuss sampling. This is a consideration because we often deal with data sets that are too large for Snowsight statistics and visualizations to manage. Snowsight is especially useful in helping to identify outliers and quality issues with initial data loads, but its capabilities are intended for use on only a small number of rows. We can reduce a large data set into a smaller subset through the LIMIT clause or the SAMPLE ...