What is Snowflake Data Warehouse? And its Benefits?

Meaning of Snowflake Data Warehouse

Snowflake Data Warehouse is a fully managed, cloud data warehouse designed on top of Amazon Web Services infrastructure - available to customers in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Database-as-a-Service (DaaS). The phrase ‘fully managed’ means users no longer have to be concerned about any of the back-end work like server installation, maintenance, etc. A Snowflake Data Warehouse instance can easily be implemented on either of the top major cloud providers:

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft Azure

Google Cloud Storage (GCS)

For Snowflake instance, the customer has the liberty to choose the cloud provider. This comes in handy for organizations that work with a lot of cloud providers. Snowflake querying adheres to the industry-standard ANSI SQL protocol and supports both fully and partially structured data, such as Parquet, XML, JSON, etc.

Snowflake Data Warehouse Architecture

When it comes to storage, there are cloud storage options that include shared-disk (for storing durable data) and shared-nothing (for massively parallel processing, or MPP, of queries with some local data storage) entities. Before being stored in a columnar format, ingested cloud data is optimized. Snowflake manages all aspects of data ingestion, compression, and storage; in fact, users can only access the stored data through SQL queries since direct access is not allowed to them.

Next comes the query processing level, where SQL queries are processed. All SQL queries run in a dedicated MPP environment as part of a specific cluster made up of many compute nodes (this is adjustable). Virtual data warehouses are another name for these specialized MPPs. It is typical for a firm to have distinct virtual environments for its many business divisions, including marketing, finance, and sales. Although this configuration is relatively pricey, it guarantees data integrity and top performance.

Cloud services are our last option. There are a number of services that bind together the many Snowflake units, ranging from infrastructure and storage management to access control and data security.

Benefits of Snowflake Data Warehouse

Below listed are the advantages of using Snowflake Data Warehouse for your business:

A fully managed, cloud-deployed Data Warehouse requires little effort to get started.

Easy to scale as enables a variety of flexible options.

Lots of versatile options that are simple to scale (as discussed above).

Compute & Storage can be separated from each other.

ANSI SQL protocol is followed, and JSON, Parquet, XML, ORC, and both fully & semi-structured data types are supported.

Snowflake competes with services like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and others in the same market segment and is quite successful with huge clientele using the service.

READ MORE: Turbocharge Your Business With Snowflake Cloud Data Platform