Creating & Using Snowflake Streams

In this tutorial, we’ll show how to create and use streams in Snowflake.

(This article is part of our Snowflake Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

Streams in Snowflake explained

A Snowflake stream—short for table stream—keeps track of changes to a table. You can use Snowflake streams to:

• Emulate triggers in Snowflake (unlike triggers, streams don’t fire immediately)
• Gather changes in a staging table and update some other table based on those changes at some frequency

Tutorial use case

Here we create a sample scenario: an inventory replenishment system. When we receive replenishment orders, we need to increase on-hand inventory.

We run this task manually. In actual use, you would want to run it as a Snowflake task on some kind of fixed schedule.