Snowflake

In my dbt projects, YAML is where descriptions, tests and ownership live together. I use persist_docs to carry model descriptions into Snowflake, then CI checks to stop the documentation quietly falling behind. The governance part comes from what we build around that metadata. It doesn’t happen because a file happens to be YAML.

I use Terraform to provision my Snowflake environment and dbt to describe the transformations inside it. Databases, roles and warehouses on one side; models, tests and documentation on the other. Both are code, reviewed in git and deployed through a pipeline.

There’s a moment in every data engineer’s life when you find yourself staring at a 300-line SQL file that creates roles, grants, warehouses, and you wonder how you got here. This is my story.