5 Business Benefits of Using Snowflake Data Warehouse

Whether you are in the infancy stages of understanding the power of data and what your organization requires to do to harness that power to grow, it all starts with how that data is being managed in the organization.

Understanding data warehousing is significant to moving forward to capitalize on the data that is being collected. An organization needs to do so many things to collect, manage, and protect proprietary data. Snowflake is a data warehouse and platform with many advantages and has attracted a lot of attention in recent times- especially with it being a cloud computing-based warehouse. Snowflake has stuck its neck out to be nontraditional in the sense that it is more flexible and has a unique architecture.

While there are many cloud data warehouses, Snowflake Inc. is a cloud-based DW startup established in 2012. Snowflake gives analytics service and a cloud-based data storage, generally termed “data warehouse as a service.” It allows corporate users to analyze and store data using cloud-based hardware and software. The Snowflake DW utilizes a new SQL database engine with a unique architecture designed for the cloud. Snowflake has many similarities to other EDW’s but also has additional functionality and unique capabilities.

What is a Snowflake data warehouse?

Snowflake is a data warehouse fabricated on top of the Microsoft Azure or AWS cloud infrastructure. There’s no software or hardware to select, install, configure, or manage. Hence, it’s perfect for companies that don’t want to dedicate resources for maintenance, setup, and support of in-house servers. And data can be navigated with ease into Snowflake using an ETL solution.

But what sets Snowflake outshine is its data sharing capabilities and architecture. The Snowflake architecture allows computing and storage to scale independently, so consumers can utilize and pay for computation and storage individually. And the sharing process makes it easy for companies to share governed and secure data in real-time quickly.

Now that we know about Snowflake data warehouse let’s navigate through its business benefits.

5 Snowflake benefits for your business

Snowflake is made specifically for the cloud, and it’s designed to resolve and address numerous issues found in older hardware-based data warehouses, like data transformation issues, limited scalability, and failures or delays due to humongous query volumes. Below are five ways a Snowflake data warehouse can benefit your business.

Speed and Performance

The flexible nature of the cloud means if you want to run a high volume of queries or load data faster, you can scale up your virtual warehouse to take advantage of extra compute resources. Moreover, you can also scale down the virtual warehouse and pay for only the time you used.

Support and Storage for structured and semi-structured data

You can combine structured and semi-structured data for analysis and pump it into the cloud database without the requirement for transformation or conversion into a fixed relational schema first. Snowflake automatically optimizes how the data is queried and stored.

Accessibility and Concurrency

With a traditional DW and a humongous number of use cases or users, you can experience concurrency issues (such as failures or delays) when too many queries hit the resources.

Snowflake addresses concurrency problems with its unique multi-cluster architecture: Queries from one virtual warehouse never affect the queries from another. Each virtual warehouse can scale up and down as per the needs. Data scientists and Data analysts can get what they require, when they require it, without waiting for other processing and loading tasks to complete.

Flawless data sharing

Snowflake’s architecture allows data sharing among Snowflake users. It also allows organizations to share data with any data consumer seamlessly — whether they are Snowflake consumers or not — through reader accounts that can be curated directly from the UI. This functionality allows the provider to manage and create a Snowflake account for a consumer.

Security and Availability

Snowflake is distributed over availability zones of the platform on which it runs — either Azure or AWS — and is designed to operate continually and tolerate network and component failures with minimum impact to consumers. It has add-on levels of security — like support for PHI data for HIPAA consumers and encryption across entire network communications — are available.

Final Thoughts

If you have a diverse IoT solutions database or data ecosystem, you will want a cloud-based DW that gives sheer scalability, nearly infinite expansion, and ease of use. And you will require a data integration solution that is optimized for cloud operation. Using our enterprise data warehouse solutions to extract and load data makes migration easy, and users can run transformations based on data stored within Snowflake.

As a Snowflake Partner, Polestar Solutions assist companies to assess their data management needs and quantify their storage needs. If you have an on-premise DW, our cloud & data experts help you migrate without downtime or data loss, or logic loss. Further, our data science team enables data analysis & visualization for quick decision-making to maximize the returns on your investment.