Snowflake Dashboards and Other Key Features of Snowsight

Everyone in the world seeks new and innovative ways of doing complex things in a simplified way, and as technology advances into new horizons, becomes possible and achievable through different methods.

Having data is good but what is data without a way to visualize, communicate, and deduce insights? Enter the Snowflake Dashboards and Chart Tool, also known as Snowsight. Data visualization becomes a lot easier to identify trends, patterns, outliers, and discover insights. Visuals such as graphs or maps are more effective for the human mind to comprehend and read meanings than large amounts of data.

This article will look at the Snowflake dashboards and chart tool, Snowsight. Snowsight is Snowflake’s new web user interface that replaces the traditional Snowflake SQL Worksheet and helps you undertake ad-hoc data analysis, perform data validation while loading data, and quickly create simple charts and dashboards that can be shared or explored together.

Some major visualization tools are best suited for corporate reporting and for building complex dashboards where they have a large number of users, but the Snowflake dashboards tool is best for individuals or small groups of users in an organization that wants to create simple visualizations and share information among themselves, making it a wonderful choice. 

The article will further explain the Snowflake dashboards and chart tools and their features like data visualizations, automatic contextual statistics, script version history, custom filtering, and much more. 

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse. Snowflake, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, provides fast, robust, and ad-hoc services for storing, querying, and analyzing data at scale. It is built on Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, and Google infrastructure.

In Snowflake, you can have an unlimited number of concurrent workloads against the same single copy of data and not interfere with the performance of other users. It is ideal for today’s startups because of its off-the-shelf deployability and self-service model. Snowflake is also scalable, which means you can scale up and scale down your processing needs as per your requirements.

For more information about Snowflake, visit the official website.

What are Snowflake Dashboards and Charts Tools, Snowsight?

Snowsight is Snowflake’s SQL Worksheets replacement and it is designed to support data analyst activities. It is found in the new Snowflake web interface and is regarded as an interactive SQL editor with charts and dashboards for data visualization. It helps you perform data validation, explorative SQL queries, create quick charts that can be shared with team members, and archive worksheets.

How to Enable the Snowflake Dashboards and Chart Tool?

To enable it for all roles in your account, you will carry out a one-time setup which steps include the following:

1. Use your administrator account to log into Snowflake or switch your session content to the ACCOUNTADMIN role after logging in.
2. Click on Snowsight and the web interface service opens in a new tab.
3. Click Worksheets in the left pane to open the Ready to Start Using Worksheets and Dashboards dialog box.
4. Click the Enable Worksheets and Dashboards button and Snowsight will be enabled for all roles in your account.

Once you open the Snowsight web interface, you will get a notification to import your worksheets from the Classic Console. Now, follow the following instructions: 

Get started Panel > Import Worksheets button > Import button, or you can simply create a new worksheet by clicking on the Worksheet button.

What are the Snowflake Dashboards and Chart Tool’s Screen Layout?

1. This button allows you to perform actions on the open worksheet such as moving the worksheet to a new or existing folder or dashboard, duplicating the worksheet, applying standard SQL formatting to the query in the worksheet, and finally, deleting the worksheet. 
2. Use this to choose the context of the session like the current role, warehouse, database for the session user.
3. The query editor is used to write and edit queries.
4. This is used to switch between activities on the home page. These activities include exploring the query results, creating charts, and browsing the schema.
5. This is used to create a new worksheet, share a worksheet, or execute queries in the current worksheet you are working on.
6. The history button can be used to open a previous worksheet that has been worked on.

Snowflake Dashboards Tool’s other Features

In this section, you will be shown how to visualize your worksheet data results using charts and dashboards, and other features will be mentioned.

Charts 

When SQL queries are executed, charts are used to transform the query results into appealing visualizations that can identify patterns and outliers in the data quickly, thereby helping you make informed and decisive decisions. Snowsight supports the following chart types: Bar charts, Line charts, Scatterplots, Heat grids, and Scorecards.

When a result is returned from executing a query, clicking the Charts tab enables the worksheets to automatically create a chart for you based on the results of the query. At the moment, each query supports the creation of a single chart. 

You can always change the chart type or adjust the chart at any point in time using the appropriate sections like orientation (Vertical or horizontal), grouping, axis labeling, chart axis, bucketing, and types of aggregation in the inspector. All changes are saved automatically, and your charts can be downloaded in the inspector by clicking on the download button to get a PNG file. 

Dashboards

Dashboards are displays of one or more charts as tiles and can be rearranged using drag and drop functionality. Snowsights allows the creation of dashboards using new or existing worksheets. Dashboards can only include worksheets you own and do not include shared worksheets.

Creating Snowflake Dashboards

Creating Snowflake Dashboards from Existing Worksheets

To create a dashboard from an existing worksheet, carry out the following steps:

1. Click on Worksheets.
2. Go to My Worksheets or open a local worksheet under Recent or in Folders
3. Click the worksheet name <worksheet_name>.
4. Click on the name of the open worksheet in the upper-left corner of the page, then click Move to >> + New dashboard, and the New dashboard dialog box will open.
5. Enter a name for the new dashboard.
6. Click the Create Dashboard button to display the worksheet.
7. Click the – <dashboard_name> button in the upper-left corner. The new dashboard then displays a chart for the worksheet you just added.

When a worksheet is moved to a dashboard, it is no longer listed under My Worksheets and can no longer be edited from within the context of the dashboard. Also, if the worksheet was shared, this permission will be revoked, but you can now share the dashboard link.

Editing on Snowflake Dashboards

To edit a dashboard, you are effectively editing charts and worksheets. Below, you will be shown how to edit charts and worksheets. 

Editing Charts

To edit charts, carry out the following steps:

1. Go to Dashboards.
2. My Dashboards or open a local dashboard under Recent.
3. Click on the dashboard name <dashboard_name>.
4. Click the edit button in a tile (…) then click on View chart for the chart to open. 
5. You can now change the chart type, modify the data displayed in the chart.
6. Click the – Return to<dashboard_name> link in the upper-left corner of the chart when you are done editing the chart to return to the dashboard.

Editing Worksheets

1. Go to Dashboards.
2. My Dashboards or open a local dashboard under Recent.
3. Click on the dashboard name <dashboard_name>
4. Click the edit button in a tile (…) then click on View query for the worksheet to open.
5. Edit the query to suit your desired specifications.
6. Click the – Return to<dashboard_name> link in the upper-left corner of the worksheet when you are done editing the worksheet to return to the dashboard.

For more instructions and readings on Charts and Dashboards on Snowsight, visit the official website here.

Other Features of Snowsight

This section of the article will look at the other features of Snowsight that will help you have a pleasant user experience.

Autocomplete

Autocomplete helps you speed up when writing queries by giving you suggestions about schemas, columns, names, and SQL functions.

Automatic Contextual Statistics

Whenever a successful execution of SQL query in Snowsight is done, the result pane shows contextual statistics for rows, columns, or data ranges. These statistics are automatically generated and can be very useful when trying to gather insights from your data by providing instant access for selected columns to get averages, sums, etc, and histograms to find outliers and quality issues.

Worksheet History

All versions of your SQL script are automatically logged once you run it and can be retrieved whenever you want to by clicking on the History dropdown menu. That means any edit you carry out on your script, a version of the previous script will be stored for you.

Custom Filter

These are special keywords that form subqueries or lists of values. You will require permission for your role before you can create custom filters, this can be done using the Admin section. You can access all the possible custom filters in Snowsight by typing the colon (:) sign and the autocomplete function will list them. Custom filters appear at the top of your screen when any of them is selected from the list.

Schema Browsing

This is used to search for tables or columns. This can be accessed by clicking on the schema tab where text can be typed into the box.

Switching Snowflake Accounts

If you have more than one Snowflake accounts where you work, Snowsights allows you to switch between these accounts conveniently. This can be done by simply clicking on the drop-down menu found at the top left-hand corner of the screen and selecting Switch Account to provide a list of Snowflake accounts from which you will choose.

Conclusion

In this write-up, you have learned about Snowsight and its functionalities. It touched on how to enable Snowsight on Snowflake, gave you details of Snowsight’s screen features, explained its visualization using charts and dashboards. It also talked about its other features such as autocomplete, automatic contextual statistics, worksheet history, etc.

To get the most out of your visualization tools, connecting your data to a data warehouse via Hevo Data’s pipeline solution will go a long way in helping you come up with the best decisions.

Hevo is a No-code Data Pipeline that will help you move data from multiple data sources to your destination. It is consistent and reliable. It has pre-built integrations from 100+ sources.

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