Snowflake provides intuitive mechanisms to navigate semi-structured data stored in VARIANT columns, especially JSON, XML, Parquet, and Avro. Two primary access methods aredot notationandbracket notation. Dot notation, such as column.nested.key, allows straightforward access to nested elements using a hierarchical reference. Bracket notation, such as column['key name'], allows access to elements with special characters, spaces, or numeric array indices. While Snowflake also offers powerful functions such as FLATTEN(), OBJECT_CONSTRUCT(), and ARRAY_LENGTH(), these operate on semi-structured types but do not serve as direct field-access mechanisms. Cloud Functions play no role in querying semi-structured fields inside Snowflake. Dot and bracket notation work together to provide full expressiveness, enabling users to traverse complex hierarchical structures directly in SQL, making Snowflake an ideal platform for semi-structured data analytics.

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