How to delete duplicate records in snowflake

Handling duplicates in data is a common challenge for data engineers and analysts, especially when you are working with large datasets. In Snowflake, a cloud-based data platform, ensuring that the data remains clean and accurate is crucial for reliable analysis and decision-making. While Snowflake offers powerful SQL-based tools for managing data, removing duplicates while retaining a single copy of each record can be tricky. In this blog, let’s explore efficient techniques to identify and eliminate duplicate rows in Snowflake without losing valuable information. Whether you’re dealing with duplicate records caused by data ingestion errors or accidental data redundancy, these strategies will help streamline your data pipeline and keep your datasets clean.

In Snowflake, knowingly or unknowingly your SQL scripts will ingest the duplicates into target system, especially when you’re working with complex data. so, prevention is better than cure: convert all your insert or updates into merge and take decision of insert or update based on some condition which will be key columns in case of inserts and updates. Even you can further specify the other conditions using merge.

I will explain different approaches of deleting duplicate data with below dataset.

Dataset