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

• Ternary Logic — information about the behavior of NULL in boolean expressions and with comparison operators.

• 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

  • Literals and 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.

• Snowflake Database — reference for the SNOWFLAKE shared database, which is provided by Snowflake for querying/reporting on your organization, account, data sharing, and other object usage.

• Snowflake 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.

• Metadata Fields in Snowflake — concepts and reference for metadata fields in Snowflake.