snowflake-development

Topics in the source

• Snowflake Development
• Quick Start
• SQL Best Practices
• Naming and Style
• Stored Procedures -- Colon Prefix Rule
• Semi-Structured Data
• MERGE for Upserts
• Data Pipelines

Snowflake SQL, data pipelines, Cortex AI, and Snowpark Python development. Covers the colon-prefix rule, semi-structured data, MERGE upserts, Dynamic Tables, Streams+Tasks, Cortex AI functions, agent specs, performance tuning, and security hardening. Originally contributed by James Cha-Earley — enhanced and integrated by the claude-skills team. -- Use snakecase for all identifiers. Avoid double-quoted identifiers -- they force case-sensitive names that require constant quoting. Use CTEs (WITH clauses) over nested subqueries. Use CREATE OR REPLACE for idempotent DDL. Use explicit column lists -- never SELECT in production. Snowflake's columnar storage scans only referenced columns, so explicit lists reduce I/O. In SQL stored procedures (BEGIN...END blocks), variables and parameters must use the colon : prefix inside SQL statements. Without it, Snowflake treats them as column identifiers and raises "invalid identifier" errors. This applies to DECLARE variables, LET variables, and procedure parameters when used inside SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or MERGE. VARIANT, OBJECT, ARRAY for JSON/Avro/Parquet/ORC. Access nested fields: src:customer.name::STRING. Always cast with ::TYPE. VAR

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