What Is Snowflake?
Born from the idea of a true data warehouse-as-a-service, Snowflake delivers the performance, concurrency, and simplicity needed to store and analyze all of an organization’s data in one solution.
Snowflake is a data cloud solution and is the only platform that can be used as a data warehouse and a data lake. By providing such functionalities, users gain the ability to have a centralized data warehouse for all their analytical needs, as well as a data lake for all their unstructured data. By using Snowflake, you can create and build your data architecture within the boundaries of a single platform allowing easy, real-time access to your data.
Snowflake’s cloud services work as a collection of services that coordinate activities across snowflakes. It bonds the data processing engine, storage layer, and user interface that allows you to process user requests from login to query dispatch. This also helps in providing a single platform for all the data-related activities.
Services managed in this layer include:
- Authentication
- Infrastructure management
- Metadata management
- Query parsing and optimization
- Access control
High Speed Data Processing
The data processing engine of Snowflake is based on Massively Parallel Processing (MPP). MPP is a type of parallel computing that uses multiple processors to work on a single task. In order to process the data stored in the data warehouse, Snowflake uses a distributed architecture in which each node processes a portion of the data. This helps in reducing the time taken to process the data and also allows businesses to scale their data processing needs as per their requirement. This offers the data management simplicity of a shared-disk architecture while providing the performance and benefits of the shared-nothing architecture.
Snowflake stores data in a centralized data repository which is then replicated across multiple servers. This ensures that your data is always available and can be accessed by authorized users only. The storage layer is used to store all the data in a form of Hybrid Columnar Storage. Unlike conventional row-based storage, HCS compresses and encodes data before storing it. This helps in reducing the size of the data which in turn reduces the cost of storage as well as allows faster query processing.
What are the benefits of using Snowflake?
Competitive Pricing
Having a data warehouse should not cost a fortune and that’s why Snowflake offers competitive pricing. The model allows businesses to only pay for what they use. They also don’t charge any hidden fees or costs, so you can be sure that you’re getting the best value for your money. This means you have the choice to set up an idle time so that you’re not paying for time when you’re not using the data warehouse.
Scalability
As your business grows, your data processing needs will also increase. With Snowflake, you can easily scale up your data processing capabilities as per your requirement. System failures, delays, or any other issues will not impact the performance of your data warehouse as they design the solution with multi-cluster architecture.
Data Sharing Made Easy
Using a single language across all your data platforms makes it easy to share data and insights with other Snowflake users. With the SQL query language, you can easily access and analyze data from any platform. You can also use the web interface to connect to any third-party tool of your choice.
Supports Various File Formats
Snowflake supports various file formats such as JSON, Avro, CSV, and Parquet. This allows businesses to easily store and query their data.
Easy To Navigate
The platform is designed to be user-friendly. With or without coding experience, you’ll be able to use the platform with ease. With this, the need for a specific team to manage the data warehouse is eliminated, and any member of your organization can access and use the data stored in it, reducing overall costs.
No Administration Cost
Unlike other data warehouses, Snowflake doesn’t charge any administration fees. That means you can focus on running your business without having to worry about the costs of maintaining your data warehouse. The product features auto-scaling, auto-suspend, and data sharing that eliminates the need for manual administration which will then save you time and money.
Speed Performance
Speed and performance are vital in any data-driven organization. With Snowflake, you can be sure that your data processing needs will be met in the shortest time possible. They offer a fast query performance because of their columnar storage and vectorized execution features. It avoids the materialization of intermediate results which covers a huge amount of time. Data is also compressed automatically to reduce I/O which further improves query performance.
Provides Near-Unlimited Resources
As Snowflake is not bound by the limitations of legacy on-premises solutions ported to the cloud, it provides users with an almost unlimited amount of storage and resources. That means businesses can focus on their data processing needs without having to worry about the scalability of their data warehouse. You as the user can apply dedicated compute clusters to each workload in almost unlimited quantities for virtually unlimited concurrency without contention.
Near-Endless Data Strategy Combinations
With the secure sharing and accessing of governed data, tools, applications, and data services, businesses can try out different combinations for their data strategy. You can also use the platform to get insights from your data in real-time without having to copy it to another database or data warehouse. This way, you can quickly iterate on your data strategy without incurring any additional costs providing you with a solution that will help your company advance.
Security
We understand how the majority of organizations and businesses handle sensitive data. With Snowflake, you can be confident that your data is secure and compliant with industry regulations. They have a number of security features such as encryption, role-based access control, and auditing that ensure only authorized users can access your data. Two-factor authentication, SSO authentication, and AES 256 encryption are also available to further secure your data.
Simple data exchange with Snowflake using Cloudbridge
Cloudbridge provides accelerators to speed up the task of integrating your new Snowflake data lake with your existing applications and data sources.
Cloudbridge streamlines data loads into Snowflake. As well as supporting the transfer of data via flat files, Cloudbridge allows you to cut out the middleman and load data directly into Snowflake from Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases.
For example, if you need to get data flowing from your Oracle database into a Snowflake data lake, you can do this by adding a job to Cloudbridge with a single step. The only information you need to provide is the source query and destination table name and the credentials for the Oracle and Snowflake systems. The job is then set up to extract the data from Oracle into Snowflake. You can use the same method to get data flowing from a SQL Server database.
Thanks to the extensive connectivity of Cloudbridge, you can then get that data flowing from Snowflake into the rest of your application estate. The Cloudbridge job engine and scheduler fully automates those data flows. Using Cloudbridge data integration libraries you can build fast and powerful process flows to connect your Snowflake data warehouse to your databases, ERP, EPM and analytics applications to fully exploit Snowflake’s power and performance.
