SnowConvert AI - General Conversion Settings¶

File encoding settings¶

This setting in SnowConvert AI determines how the tool reads and interprets the text within your source files. Choosing the correct encoding is important to ensure that all characters, especially accented letters, symbols, or text from various languages, are processed correctly during conversion. By default SnowConvert AI uses UTF-8.

Manually Selecting an Encoding

You can choose to override this automatic process by selecting a specific encoding from the dropdown menu. If you select an encoding manually (even if you select UTF-8 explicitly), SnowConvert AI will use only that chosen encoding to read the files.

Available Encoding Options

The dropdown list allows you to force SnowConvert AI to use one of these specific encodings:

Understanding System Default (Preview)

When selecting the System Default (Preview) , SnowConvert AI uses a flexible approach:

1. It first tries to automatically detect the specific character encoding of each input file.

2. If auto-detection doesn’t identify the encoding, SnowConvert AI proceeds using UTF-8, which handles a very wide range of characters and is common for modern files.

3. As a fallback, if the UTF-8 interpretation fails because it finds characters that aren’t valid in UTF-8, SnowConvert AI will then attempt to use your computer’s default system encoding.

It’s marked “Preview” because this behavior is experimental. System defaults can vary significantly between different computers and operating systems, potentially leading to inconsistent results or unsupported encodings.

Recommendation

If you encounter errors related to text interpretation or see garbled characters in your results, manually selecting the correct encoding is the best solution. If you know your files use a specific format (like Western European), select that. If you’re unsure but suspect encoding issues, explicitly selecting UTF-8 is often a good starting point as it’s the most common standard for modern files.

Materialized views conversion settings¶

On this page, you will find the necessary options to customize the parameters for translating Materialized Views (or join indexes in Teradata) to Dynamic Tables during your conversion.

To preserve the full functionality of Materialized Views, or Teradata’s Join Indexes, SnowConvert AI generates Dynamic Tables instead of creating a one-to-one Materialized View or transforming a Join Index into a Materialized View. This approach is necessary because Snowflake lacks certain configuration options available in other systems’ Materialized Views.

For further details on the limitations of Snowflake’s Materialized Views, please refer to Materialized Views Limitations.