Why Snowflake is the real power – Snowflake Review

Snowflake is a cloud-based data-warehousing platform, which enables a modern data warehouse, augmented data lakes, accelerated analytics, Integrated data engineering, Secure Data Exchange, Agile Data App Development and Advanced Data Science Features.

The real power of Snowflake lies in its architecture and its flexibility. Snowflake is the first analysis performable database built for the cloud, meaning you can access your data warehouses from anywhere. On top of this, it seamlessly integrates with AWS and other cloud platforms. 

Snowflake handles all aspects of authentication, configuration, resource management, data protection, optimisation, and availability and as a user, you only need to sign-up, load your data and start querying.Overly, this means that a lot of the hassle that surrounds traditional data analysis platforms doesn’t exist for Snowflake users! 

How does Snowflake differ from other traditional architectures?

In traditional architectures:

Shared disk architectures use multiple nodes to access data shared on a single storage system and Shared nothing architecture stores a portion of data in each node and each cluster in the data warehouses.

In snowflake architecture:

It combines the benefits of both architectures in an innovative new design that takes full advantage of the cloud using its multi-cluster shared data architecture, which consists of three separate layers:

• Data Storage Layer

• Compute Layer

• Service Layer

Each layer scales independently and includes built-in redundancy, and in addition to that, snowflake lets you store structured relational data and semi-structural non-relational data.

Snowflake’s architecture is made up of three layers: database storage layer, query/compute layer & cloud services layer.

Regardless of the data types, we can use ANSI standard SQL to perform all data related tasks. 

Snowflake uses highly secured cloud storage to maintain all your data and as data is loaded into tables, snowflake converts into an optimized columnar compressed format and encrypts it using AES 256 strong encryption.

Unlike traditional architectures snowflake allows you to create multiple independent compute clusters called virtual warehouses that all access the same data storage layer without contention or performance degradation.

To create a virtual warehouse you simply give it a name, specify a size, and snowflake handles all the provisioning and configuration of the underlying compute resources. On top of this, virtual warehouses can be scaled up or down at any time without any downtime or disruption.

The key advantage with snowflake is when a virtual warehouse is resized, subsequent queries take advantage of additional resources and its unique cloud architecture enables virtually unlimited scale and concurrency without resource contention.

For example, separate virtual warehouses can be used to handle loading and querying concurrently because virtual warehouses access the same data storage layer and any update or inserts become immediately available to all other warehouses.

On top of everything, the service layer coordinates and manages the entire system by authenticating users, managing sessions, securing data, performing query compilation and optimization. It also manages virtual warehouses and coordinates data storage updates and access, ensuring that once a transaction is completed, all virtual warehouses see the new version of the data with no impact on availability or performance.

The key component of the services layer is the metadata store, which powers a number of unique snowflake features including Zero Copy Cloning, Time Travel and Data Sharing.

A growing ecosystem of external tools have native connectivity with Snowflake, meaning virtually all operations can be seamlessly integrated with the platform and making it even simpler to complete operations. 

What do you need to manage Snowflake?

Not much, snowflake eliminates most of the tuning knobs and parameters required by other data warehouses and you only need to create database tables and virtual warehouses, load data and execute queries - Snowflake handles the rest.

How much does snowflake cost?

The advantage with Snowflake is that you only need to pay for the storage and computing resources used. 

Storage costs are based on the amount of compressed data stores in database tables and the additional data are retained to support Snowflakes unique data recovery features.

Compute costs are based on warehouse size and how long your warehouse/s is/are running.

We hoped this brought some insight into the powers of Snowflake and the efficiencies it can create for companies with large amounts of data stored and being used. If you’re interested in learning more about Snowflake, get in touch for a chat on your data strategy today! 

Do you use Snowflake? We’d love to know your thoughts on this platform and whether you’ll be using it. Join the discussion on our LinkedIn Page.