Double Quoted Identifiers

When referencing objects within the Coalesce platform and when creating objects in Snowflake, Coalesce wraps the object identifiers in double quotes. 

Coalesce does not provide an out-of-the-box way to remove this double quoting of identifiers. However, because of the way Snowflake works with identifier reconciliation, objects created double-quoted in upper case can be referred to in any case. For example, if you were to create a table called DIM_CUSTOMER using quoted identifiers in the create statement (ie: CREATE TABLE "EDW"."DIM"."DIM_CUSTOMER") in Snowflake you could refer to this table as: 

  • DIM_CUSTOMER
  • dim_customer
  • DiM_cuSToMeR
  • Etc.

 
However, if you were to create an object double-quoted in lower case or mixed case, it would have to be referenced in its exact double-quoted case in Snowflake to reconcile. For example:

  • If you were to create a table called dim_customer using quoted identifiers in the create statement (ie: CREATE TABLE "EDW"."DIM"."dim_customer") in Snowflake you could only refer to this table going forward as "dim_customer"
  • If you were to create a table called Dim_Customer using quoted identifiers in the create statement (ie: CREATE TABLE "EDW"."DIM"."Dim_Customer") in Snowflake you could only refer to this table going forward as "Dim_Customer"

In the case of the above--lowercase and mixed-case identifiers requiring precise casing to reconcile--Snowflake offers a parameter--QUOTED_IDENTIFIERS_IGNORE_CASE--that can be set to ignore casing, allowing you to reference such objects in any case without double quoting. More information on this parameter and its use can be found in the Snowflake knowledge base.