What is Snowflake?
One of the most valuable assets in companies today is data. At the same time, most data originates in the cloud. Even if data is originated on-premises or by co-located teams, the data ought to be consumed by distributed teams around the globe.
Meet Snowflake. Snowflake is a Data Warehouse solution that was born cloud-native, cloud-agnostic and combines the power of a flexible compute engine (shared-nothing) with shared-disk database architectures. This new architecture is called Multi-Cluster Shared Data.
Snowflake enables companies to integrate any cloud data sources having design in mind from the start. At the same time, a flexible per-second IT billing scheme , scheduling and streaming integration enable modern Extract, Load and Transform out-of-the-shelf. Thus, DW built on top of Snowflake are of high quality, maintainability and availability for faster distribution across business areas and better informed decisions.
Main benefits of Snowflake:
- Accelerate the Data Governance Strategy: A menagerie of sharing options is made available in the cloud without the need of physically copying the data into a special database or bucket. All data sharing is performed logically between accounts, either inside or outside Snowflake.
- Cross-Cloud Data Integration: Through external tables and stages it can smoothly keep up with changes in data that resides in other clouds.
- Automatic Database Management: No indexes need to be created. Computing and storage capability are decoupled both between them and in regards to Snowflake. Thus, this feature bolsters its availability and capacity making it virtually limitless. No parameters, no distribution, no key management (optional), no tuning, no vacuuming.
- Scaling without disruption: It can handle query request surges automatically. These operations are made in the background without affecting any running query. Given a scaling policy, it can optimize either for cost or availability.
- Performant on structured and semi-structured data types: Snowflake can read and write data in JSON, Parquet, CSV and many other formats, natively and efficiently.
Main benefits of Snowflake for specific roles:
- Accelerate the Data Governance Strategy: A menagerie of sharing options is made available in the cloud without the need of physically copying the data into a special database or bucket. All data sharing is performed logically between accounts, either inside or outside Snowflake.
- Cross-Cloud Data Integration: Through external tables and stages it can smoothly keep up with changes in data that resides in other clouds.
- Automatic Database Management: No indexes need to be created. Computing and storage capability are decoupled both between them and in regards to Snowflake. Thus, this feature bolsters its availability and capacity making it virtually limitless. No parameters, no distribution, no key management (optional), no tuning, no vacuuming.
- Scaling without disruption: It can handle query request surges automatically. These operations are made in the background without affecting any running query. Given a scaling policy, it can optimize either for cost or availability.
- Performant on structured and semi-structured data types: Snowflake can read and write data in JSON, Parquet, CSV and many other formats, natively and efficiently.
Snowflake main features:
- Zero-Copy cloning
- Time travel and Fail-Safe
- Streams
- Data Masking and Security
- Partner Connect and Data Sharing
- Materialized Views
- Scheduling Tasks
- Cloud agnostic external tables
- Staging areas