Turbocharge Your Business With Snowflake Cloud Data Platform

Cloud has evolved quite considerably throughout the last decade providing confidence to organizations still hoping on legacy systems for their data and analytics ventures. There’s an excess of choices for organisations enthusiastic about their immediate or specific data management needs.

This article addresses anyone or any organization that is looking for data warehousing options that are accessible in the cloud and shine a light on Snowflake - a cloud data platform, and how it perfectly fits if you are thinking of migrating to a new cloud data warehouse.

The cloud data warehouse market is a very challenging space but is also characterised by the specialised offerings of different players. Azure, AWS Redshift, SQL data warehouse, and Google BigQuery are big alternatives that are available in a rapidly advanced data warehousing market, which estimates its value in excess of 18 billion USD.

The main reason for driving the evolution of modern data warehousing is 'Cloud'. The cloud brings:

• Near infinite, low-priced storage
• Scale-up / scale-down adeptness
• Outsourcing the difficult operations functions of the data warehousing platform & security to the cloud vendor
• Flexibility to pay only for the storage and data-processing, when you use them
• Convert data into insight, engage with teams by simply sharing secure and governed data in near real-time, without spending all your time operating infrastructure

With many big and renowned names in the technology space, you need to bring something unique to make a mark. Snowflake has surprisingly pulled that off.

Snowflake As Cloud Data Platform

Snowflake is a data warehouse solution built for the cloud with a unique architecture provided as a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) with full support for ANSI SQL, Snowflake data warehouse built on top of the AWS, Google Cloud or Azure cloud infrastructure and delivers an extensive range of technology solutions covering data integration, BI, advanced analytics, security & governance making adoption quick and facile.

First of all Snowflake architecture is what makes it most popular. It delivers the scale, performance, and automation that simply isn’t possible with a standard data warehouse or big data platform that has been moved to the cloud.

The Snowflake Architecture:

Snowflake is built to be an enterprise-ready service for any organization that wants to modernize its Cloud Data Warehousing solution for unlimited scalability & convincing performance. Besides offering high degrees of usability and interoperability, enterprise readiness means high availability.

To this end, Snowflake is a service-oriented architecture composed of high fault tolerance and independently scalable services. These services communicate through restful interfaces & fall under three architectural layers.

Snowflake is a data warehouse solution built for the cloud with a unique architecture provided as a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) with full support for ANSI SQL, Snowflake data warehouse is built on top of the AWS, Google Cloud or Azure cloud infrastructure and delivers an extensive range of technology solutions covering data integration, BI, advanced analytics, security & governance making adoption quick and facile.

First of all Snowflake architecture is what makes it most popular. It delivers the scale, performance, and automation that simply isn’t possible with a standard data warehouse or big data platform that has been moved to the cloud.

Snowflake is built to be an enterprise-ready service for any organization that wants to modernize its Cloud Data Warehousing solution for unlimited scalability & convincing performance. Besides offering high degrees of usability and interoperability, enterprise-readiness means high availability.

To this end, Snowflake is a service-oriented architecture composed of high fault tolerance and independently scalable services. These services communicate through restful interfaces & fall under three architectural layers.

Source: Snowflake

The balance between these features and its flexible pricing policy, Snowflake truly left behind its competitors on analytical workloads - both traditional on-premise storage & other cloud-based solutions, like Oracle, Redshift, Teradata, SQL Server, or Azure DWH.

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• Firstly, Snowflake leverages ordinary SQL query language, meaning organizations or functions that are already using SQL in their teams won’t require “re-skilling”.

• Significantly, Snowflake assists the foremost popular data formats like JSON, Avro, Parquet, ORC and XML. The potential to store diverse data (structured, unstructured and semi-structured) under one platform will help to tackle the overall problem of handling all the incongruent data types that exist within a single data warehouse.

• Snowflake features an advanced architecture for fetching the gains of native cloud platforms. However, most of the traditional warehouses assist a single-layer for their storage and operation, Snowflake enables a smart method by splitting data storage, data processing, and data consumption all in one go. However, storage & computation resources are dissimilar from each other hence, it should be managed particularly. It’s nice to ensure very cheap storage and more compute per dollar, while not drive up costs by combining the two essential components of warehousing.

• Snowflake offers two distinct user experiences for interaction with data, different for a data engineer and a data analyst. The data engineers load the data and function from the application side and are effectively the admin and the owners of the system

• With the help of Data analysts, various sorts of data are used to drive business insights after it is loaded in the system by a data engineer. Here again, Snowflake does the work for you by separating the two functions and allowing a data analyst to replicate a data warehouse and further edit it to any level without making any impact in the original data warehouse.

• Lastly, Snowflake assists immediate data warehouse resizing to deal with concurrency bottlenecks during periods of high demand. Snowflake scales without the necessity for redistributing data, averting any disruption to end-users.

Data warehousing is promptly taking a move towards the cloud, and solutions such as Snowflake provide some clear-cut advantages over legacy technologies as outlined above.

With the traditional data warehousing methods and underlying technologies, business users have been facing a lot of hurdles and challenges to deliver the quality of service, simplicity, and value to keep up with rapidly changing business needs.

However, with a modern architecture Snowflake delivers exceptional performance, concurrency and easiness which make it a perfect platform, built to compile diverse data into one single layer for data analytics efforts and presents an appealing proposition in the form of Cloud Data Warehousing solution for unlimited scalability.

Need Snowflake Cloud Data Warehousing & Migration Assistance?

Polestar, an official Snowflake strategic Partner, can help bring your data from diverse sources to Snowflake in real-time. You can reach out to us or take up a free trial if you need help in setting up your Snowflake Architecture or connecting your data sources to Snowflake & would be delighted to work under your specifics in this plot.