Managing a variety of data kinds is crucial in today's data-driven environment. The ability to store unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data in one location is provided by data lakes. I just finished an extensive Data Lake Workshop that gave me first-hand knowledge of Snowflake's data lake capabilities. The main conclusions are outlined here.
I gained knowledge about non-loaded data, which is kept on external storage, and how Snowflake communicates with external data sources like Amazon S3 through STAGE objects. This makes it possible to process and query data without having to load it into Snowflake tables. Pre-loading data analysis and verification was a useful feature that provided efficiency and flexibility.
Unstructured data, including pictures, videos, and documents, is handled by Snowflake. I looked at how to query these kinds of data, which gives a lot of options, particularly for businesses that deal with a variety of data formats. With Snowflake's tools, working directly with unstructured data is made easier by enabling analysis without the requirement for conventional table forms.
One of the best parts of the workshop was working with geospatial data. I gained knowledge about how to analyse location-based data, such as determining distances and mapping coordinates, by using GeoJSON files and GeoSpatial functions. For sectors like logistics and urban planning that work with geographic data, these features are essential.
Large datasets can be stored in columnar fashion with Parquet files, as the workshop demonstrated. These files can be queried without loading them into tables using Snowflake's external tables. This offers data management flexibility and is helpful for effectively managing massive amounts of data.
Iceberg tables were presented as a feature for handling large datasets, even though they are still in the future. Better scalability and control over data storage and querying are what they promise, which is crucial for expanding datasets and gaining access to earlier iterations of the data.

Additionally, I learnt how to enhance Snowflake's capability using SQL by creating User-Defined Functions (UDFs). I created a UDF to determine distances between locations in order to automate difficult procedures and tailor data processing to meet particular requirements.

We discussed materialised views, which store precomputed results to optimise query performance. They are especially helpful when working with huge datasets because they expedite commonly performed searches.

Conclusion
This workshop gave participants insightful knowledge on how to use Snowflake's robust data lake features to manage both structured and unstructured data. I now have a strong foundation in data lake design, which is necessary for addressing contemporary data difficulties with flexibility and scalability, having worked with GeoSpatial data processing and UDF construction.