Introduction:
Businesses rely on accurate analytics to make strategic decisions. These insights are governed by data warehouses that are optimized for handling the large storage of data that feeds into reports. As Cloud data warehouses are reliable and flexible, Snowflake Cloud DW provides a very authentic cloud storage and management at reasonable costs.
What is Snowflake?
Snowflake is an analytic data warehouse provided as Software as a Service(SaaS). It is faster, easier to use and far more flexible compared to traditional data warehouse. It is build as hybrid of traditional shared-disk database architectures and shared-nothing database architectures. Currently Snowflake runs in AWS and offers a $400 credit for 30 days.
Why to use Snowflake?
- Handles both structured and semi-structured data.
- Processes queries using MPP(massively parallel processing).
- Queries can be integrated with both the R and Python.
- support ORC(Optimized Row Columnar) file format.
- Maintenance and management are handled by Snowflake itself.
- Very less DBA skills needed.
(Source: Gartner)
Supported Functionalities:
Database Storage: The file system of Snowflake is backed by Amazon S3.
Query Processing: It is used to create Virtual Warehouses in Snowflake and it has been processed by compute clusters in Amazon EC2.
Metadata Storage: In Snowflake, metadata are stored in micro-partition method, which includes:
- range of values for each of the columns
- number of distinct values
- additional properties used for Optimization and Query Processing.
You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.
Daniel Keys Moran