General Reference

These topics provide general reference information for using Snowflake.

• Parameters — parameters that can be used to control system behavior at the account, user, session, and object level.

• Data Types — supported data types (VARCHAR, NUMBER, DATE, etc.) in Snowflake:

  • Summary of Data Types

  • Numeric Data Types

  • String & Binary Data Types

  • Logical Data Types

  • Date & Time Data Types

  • Semi-structured Data Types

  • Geospatial Data Types

  • Unsupported Data Types

• Collation Support — information about sorting and other character-set-dependent operations on text strings.

• SQL Format Models — formats for specifying conversion of numeric and date/time values to and from text strings.

• Object Identifiers — rules for defining and using object identifiers, including resolving object names used in SQL statements:

  • Identifier Requirements

  • String Literals / Session Variables / Bind Variables as Identifiers

  • Object Name Resolution

• Constraints — concepts and reference information for defining and maintaining unique, primary key, and foreign key constraints in tables:

  • Overview of Constraints

  • Constraint Properties

  • Creating Constraints

  • Modifying Constraints

  • Dropping Constraints

  • Additional Constraint Details

• SQL Variables — concepts and reference for defining and using variables in sessions.

• Transactions — concepts and reference for using transactions with SQL statements.

• Table Literals — concepts and reference for using table literals instead of a single scalar value in queries.

• UDFs (User-Defined Functions) — concepts for creating user-defined SQL and Javascript functions:

  • Overview of UDFs

  • Secure UDFs

  • SQL UDFs

  • SQL UDTFs (User-Defined Table Functions)

  • JavaScript UDFs

  • JavaScript UDTFs (User-Defined Table Functions)

• External Functions — concepts for creating external functions:

  • Introduction to External Functions

  • Remote Service Input and Output Data Formats

  • Designing High-Performance External Functions

  • External Functions Best Practices

  • Creating External Functions on AWS

  • Creating External Functions on Azure

  • Securing an External Function

• Stored Procedures — concepts for creating stored procedures:

  • Overview of Stored Procedures

  • Working with Stored Procedures

  • Stored Procedures API

• Information Schema — concepts and reference for the Snowflake Information Schema, which consists of a set of metadata views and historical table functions for querying/reporting on objects in Snowflake.

• Organization Usage — concepts and reference for the SNOWFLAKE shared database, which is provided by Snowflake for querying/reporting on your account and object usage across your organization.

• Account Usage — concepts and reference for the SNOWFLAKE shared database, which is provided by Snowflake for querying/reporting on your account and object usage.