Snowflake SnowPro Core Certification Study Guide

Chapter 5Data Pipelines

THE SNOWPRO CORE EXAM TOPICS COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:

• 3.0 Domain: Data Movement

Snowflake provides the capability to schedule SQL statements and stored procedures through the concept of tasks. This chapter introduces you to tasks and walks you through creating a simple task and a complex task tree consisting of more than one task. The chapter also touches on streams, which is Snowflake's method of providing change data capture capability.

Introducing Tasks

Snowflake tasks are used to execute a SQL statement or to call a stored procedure on a schedule. Tasks are suitable for scenarios where there is a need to run SQL statements or stored procedures regularly. For example, you can use tasks to refresh data in a table used in a report, keep aggregate tables up-to-date, load data into Snowflake, export data out of Snowflake, or even perform maintenance actions on a schedule.

Snowflake tasks can be executed based on a schedule or triggered manually using the EXECUTE TASK command.

Multiple tasks can be connected to perform multiple actions if needed. Also, tasks can be used with streams to perform continuous data processing.

Scheduling a Task

Tasks can be created using the CREATE TASK command. The basic syntax for creating a task is as follows. Note that a simplified syntax is shown here. For the complete syntax, please refer to Snowflake's documentation.

CREATE TASK <task_name>
 { WAREHOUSE = <string> } | { USER_TASK_MANAGED_INITIAL_WAREHOUSE_SIZE ...