I know what you’re thinking: Another article on data warehouses….. snoozeville. Snowflake, I promise you, is about to shake things up. Picture neon signs flashing “Pay as you go!” and “Data access for all!”
Snowflake is a data warehouse built for, and in, the cloud. Its unique architecture keeps it free from many of the problems conventional warehouses encounter. It’s revolutionary because it delivers all of the benefits of other warehouses without the complexity. Snowflake is also good for your bottom line. By separating compute from storage, storage becomes very inexpensive and you only pay for compute when you use it. This also means you can scale your storage and compute workloads independently, boosting scalability, concurrency and performance.
More Data Sources, More Users, More Queries
Why is Snowflake so exciting? Its architecture is designed like no other to perform in the modern digital environment:
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Organizations need to handle increasing amounts of external data, which may be structured (like traditional data warehouses), unstructured, or semi-structured like JSON and XML files.
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Data-driven decision-making now happens across the organization, which expands data use to non-technical users.
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To get more value from their data, organizations want larger query volume and the ability to handle ad hoc queries.
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Conventional data warehouses have many limitations when it comes to scaling to meet these workloads. Other cloud warehouses are highly complex, requiring special skills and manual configuration, which reduces speed and agility.
In addition, Snowflake enables organizations to achieve more efficient data sharing, ability to implement two-factor authentication and can give peace of mind to healthcare organizations maintaining HIPAA compliance.
The Big 3: Performance, Concurrency and Scalability
Organizations choose Snowflake as their data store for three reasons:
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Performance – Snowflake sets new standards in speed and scalability.
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Concurrency – Snowflake’s cloud-optimized architecture enables it to scale out clones of the data to multiple, separate compute clusters across the enterprise.
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Scalability – Snowflake is designed to scale, separating compute from storage. This allows you to scale each independently for any computing workload, and for concurrency.
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Snowflake was created for the cloud and built on AWS, so it integrates cleanly. It was designed as the purest version of data warehouse as a service to bring simplicity to data warehousing. No other tools are needed – organizations simply sign up and start sending data from any source in any format to Snowflake. It can also serve as a consolidated data mart and an engine for data reporting, exploration, business intelligence and predictive analytics applications.
Modernizing Data Management
For organizations interested in bringing together diverse data and modernizing their existing data warehouse, Snowflake is an option to explore. Snowflake can also be used for the staging area, persistent staging area, raw vault, business vault, and information marts by organizations implementing a Data Vault system as well as a great compliment for organizations leveraging a Data Lake. Snowflake can use a Data Lake to create an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and information marts that enable greater querying, scalability, connectivity and security.
If you’d like to talk over the possibilities for your organization, contact us. We’re a Snowflake Solution Partner with end-to-end implementation services from architecture and design to development and delivery. We’ll help you move forward with a modern data management solution.