Let’s Talk About Snowflake
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We can’t discuss what Snowflake is without first discussing what a data warehouse is. A data warehouse is a form of data management, a system created to enable and support business intelligence activities like analytics. Data warehouses perform queries and analyses and mostly contain vast amounts of historical data. In other words, it’s an electronic method of organizing, analyzing, and reporting information.
An example of what a data warehouse is capable of: Data warehousing can make data mining possible, which helps businesses look for data patterns that will lead to higher sales and profits.
Now let’s talk Snowflake.
In the past, setting up a data warehouse meant investing in an expensive, tailored hardware appliance that also required running it in your data center. In contrast, Snowflake provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS). Snowflake delivers the flexibility and efficiency that wasn’t possible with a traditional data warehouse.
One of the many things that set Snowflake apart is its adaptability to business needs. Like cable packages, where customers can create packages and bundles for themselves, businesses can do the same with Snowflake.
Moreover, Snowflake architecture is made up of three layers: storage, compute, and services.
Database Storage: The storage layer houses data loaded into Snowflake, including structured and semi-structured data. Snowflake handles how the data is stored, how it’s organized, the file size, the structure, how it’s compressed, the metadata, and statistics. This layer runs independently from computing resources.
Compute Layer: This layer is comprised of virtual warehouses that handle data processing tasks needed for queries.
Cloud Services: Services in this layer include authentication, infrastructure management, metadata management, query parsing, and optimization and access control.
So how can Snowflake benefit your business?
Performance and Speed
Storage
Support for structured and semi-structured data
Concurrency
Accessibility
Seamless data sharing
Availability
Security
Not sure what data warehouse would benefit your business? Let’s chat!
