From the course: Advanced Snowflake: Deep Dive Cloud Data Warehousing and Analytics

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External, Iceberg, and interactive tables

External, Iceberg, and interactive tables - Snowflake Tutorial

From the course: Advanced Snowflake: Deep Dive Cloud Data Warehousing and Analytics

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External, Iceberg, and interactive tables

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With external tables, your data is stored outside of Snowflake on an external cloud storage like S3 or Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage. Snowflake can query this data without actually loading them into Snowflake's internal storage layer. This creates a virtual table definition that maps files to S3, Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage, allowing SQL queries against external data as though it were native. Snowflake supports all three major cloud platforms for external table creation, allowing you to query data wherever it lives, without vendor lock-in. You define an external stage pointing to your storage location, specify the file format, whether it's Parquet, JSON, CSV, and Snowflake handles the metadata mapping and query execution. External tables are strictly read-only. You can perform select and join operations, and join those with internal tables, but you can't insert, update, delete or merge data through the external table interface. Any modifications must happen…

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