Data Metric Functions (DMF) allow you to automate data quality validation and monitoring. DMFs allow you to:

  1. Create custom quality metric rules as a reusable functions
  2. Apply rules to one or more columns
  3. Specific how frequently you want the quality metrics to be calculated
  4. Execute metric functions ad-hoc (for testing) or incorporate into your pipelines
  5. Metrics are executed by the serverless backend, no need to keep your warehouse running
  6. View and manage all of your quality metrics in a single place

Pre-defined Data Metric Functions (DMF) in Snowflake

Snowflake has the following DMF pre-defined:

  1. FRESHNESS
  2. NULL_COUNT
  3. DUPLICATE_COUNT
  4. UNIQUE_COUNT
  5. ROW_COUNT

Trying out pre-defined DMF

You can use try out the pre-defined DMF functions in Snowflake as following:

select snowflake.core.null_count(select email_address from customer_dim);

select snowflake.core.duplicate_count(select email_address from customer_dim);

select snowflake.core.unique_count(select email_address from customer_dim);

Attaching a pre-defined Data Metric Function to a Table

The following ALTER will attach a built-in Data Metric Function NULL_COUNT to the EMAIL_ADDRESS column in the CUSTOMER_DIM table

ALTER TABLE customer_dim ADD DATA METRIC FUNCTION NULL_COUNT ON (EMAIL_ADDRESS);

Tell Snowflake to evaluate the DMF every hour:

ALTER TABLE customer_dim SET DATA_METRIC_SCHEDULE = '1 HOUR';

Inpect the quality metrics:

SELECT * FROM SNOWFLAKE.LOCAL.DATA_QUALITY_MONITORING_RESULTS

Custom Data Metric Functions

Defining a custom Data Metric Functions (DMF)

Creating a Data Metric Function is as simple as creating a UDF. The function takes a new TABLE data type with one or more column arguments and returns a single result value.

CREATE DATA METRIC FUNCTION count_of_nulls(
  ARG_T TABLE (ARG_C1 STRING, ARG_C2 STRING, ARG_C3 STRING)
)
RETURNS NUMBER
AS
$$
SELECT COUNT_IF(ARG_C1 IS NULL OR ARG_C2 IS NULL OR ARG_C3 IS NULL)
from ARG_T
$$;

All Data Metric Functions are added to your warehouse so other users can reuse them in a consistent manner without having to recreate the same rules over and over.

You can see which metrics are available by running:

SHOW DATA METRIC FUNCTIONS IN <DATABASE_NAME>.<SCHEMA_NAME>;

Attaching custom Data Metric Function to a Table

You attach the custom Data Metric Function to the columns you want to evaluate:

ALTER TABLE CUSTOMER_DIM
  ADD DATA METRIC FUNCTION count_of_nulls ON (FIRST_NAME, LAST_NAME, EMAIL_ADDRESS);

Next, you set the interval at which metrics should be calculated. This is configured at the table level and can be as frequent as 1 minute.

ALTER TABLE some_table SET DATA_METRIC_SCHEDULE = '1 HOUR';

You can test a customer DMFs by executing them ad-hoc or include them directly in your data pipelines running on Snowflake for in-line validation. This is how you execute a DMF:

SELECT scratch.saqib_ali.count_of_nulls (
  SELECT FIRST_NAME, LAST_NAME, EMAIL_ADDRESS FROM CUSTOMER_DIM
) AS VALUE;