Snowflake Data Warehouse: What is it & What are its Benefits?
Whether you’re looking to move to the cloud or if you’re looking for a virtual data warehouse, this article will shed some light on Snowflake and its key features and how it would be a great choice when considering a migration.
The cloud data warehouse market is a very challenging space but is also described by the special offerings of a provider. There are various alternatives to Azure, AWS Redshift, SQL data warehouse, and Google BigQuery available in a rapidly growing data warehousing market, whose estimated value is over 18+ billion USD.
What is a Snowflake data warehouse?
Cloud-based Snowflake is an analytics data warehouse available as a SaaS or as a DaaS. The technology is quicker to implement, easier to use, and more flexible than traditional data warehouses. Snowflake may appear similar to other cloud data warehouses, but it offers unique features and additional functionality.
The snowflake data warehouse is integrated with three major cloud providers, including
- GCS (Google Cloud Storage)
- AWS (Amazon Web Services)
- Azure by Microsoft
In the beginning, Snowflake used Amazon Web Services before moving to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Storage. There are three options available to customers or they can use multiple cloud providers simultaneously. If you’re not familiar with serverless warehouses or Snowflake, in particular, we compiled eight reasons to consider Snowflake.
Key Benefits of Using Snowflake
1. Easy to use
Snowflake is known for its intuitive and simple interface. With this service, you can spin up and down compute clusters of any size automatically or on the fly for any user or workload without affecting any other jobs. With Snowflake’s near-infinite elasticity and concurrency, your organization can achieve the performance it needs.
2. Zero administration, fully automated
The number of users and datasets you have may grow as well as your infrastructure, so you won’t encounter any configuration, software updates, or failures. As part of Snowflake’s modern features, you can auto-scale the size of your warehouse, auto suspends large data sets, and share your data.
The Openbridge data lake and pipelines offer an automated, standards-based foundation for loading data into Snowflake. You can put your team’s focus on the data consumption use cases, rather than the underlying system development.
3. Tools
Data analysis can be performed using a variety of BI tools, including Tableau, Looker, Mode Analytics, Chartio, and QlikView.
4. Snowflake Cost
You are billed according to the amount of data you store and the number of computation hours you utilize. By utilizing this cost-optimized “on-demand” solution, data is available at the time it is needed for analysis, reporting or any other business activities. Resources and prices for computing are separate from those for data storage.
Using Snowflake and a data lake, you can reduce the end-to-end cost of data processing by compressing, partitioning, and converting data before it is loaded into a data warehouse.
Calculate compute and storage costs based on your query patterns when comparing Snowflake vs. Redshift (or BigQuery). Snowflake enables you to pause your database so no time is wasted while your database is idle. When you do not take advantage of auto suspending, your Snowflake costs will rise accordingly.
5. A powerful performance
Multi-cluster systems can be managed automatically, and we don’t have to worry about turning them to achieve high performance. As an example, Snowflake has automatic query optimization. According to Snowflake, there are “no indexes, no need to partition data and figure out partition keys, and no need to pre-shard any data for distribution.” As a result, they maintain service levels that are competitive with other providers.
6. A flexible approach
Combining Snowflake with a data lake offers unparalleled flexibility and value. Additionally, you will be able to leverage both warehouses (Redshift Spectrum) and query services (Amazon Athena) on the same data lake in conjunction with Snowflake. When you have a choice, you use Snowflake because of its features, not because you have to.
7. Durability
When combined with a data lake, Snowflake ensures your data on Amazon S3 (or Azure) is highly available and durable. Multiple facilities and devices in each facility store your information redundantly, including structured data lakes.
8. Encryption & Security
It is completely within your control who has access to the data stored on their system. With access management capabilities and data encryption, access management controls help you maintain strong security.
Final Thoughts
With the rapid pace of technological change, data warehousing is rapidly moving to the cloud and solutions such as Snowflake, have some clear-cut advantages over legacy technologies discussed above.
There have been many hurdles and challenges with traditional data warehousing methods and technologies to deliver the quality of services, simplicity, and value that businesses in rapidly changing environments need, and the costs should be reasonable and manageable.
However, due to its ability to deliver a modern architecture that offers exceptional levels of concurrency and performance, Snowflake, a data warehouse platform designed to compile different data types into one layer of information for data analytics, and a Data Warehouse offering unlimited scalability and offering credible performance for business.
Need Snowflake Consulting & Migration Assistance?
Polestar Solutions, an official Snowflake Partner, can help you bring real-time data from diverse sources to Snowflake. For help in setting up your Snowflake Architecture or connecting your data sources to Snowflake, you may reach out to us or take up a free trial. We would be delighted to work with you under the specific conditions you provide.
Get to know how Polestar Solutions shares its achievements across organizations with Snowflake. We are happy to connect with you if you are interested in modernizing your organization with advanced tools and technologies.
