What is a Snowflake Data Warehouse?

Snowflake is a cloud-based data-warehouse, snowflake was first available on AWS(Amazon Web Service), but now snowflake is available on all major cloud service provider like AWS, Azure and on Google Cloud.

Snowflake data warehouse is build on new SQL engine. Since many data warehouse solutions available in the market is based on open source project like Hadoop and spark but snowflake is completely new solution build mainly for cloud data. Snowflake can be better understand with below points..

• Snowflake is the data warehouse built for the cloud. Snowflake delivers the performance, concurrency and simplicity needed to store and analyze all data available to an organization in one location.
• Snowflake’s technology combines the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms, the elasticity of the cloud, and live data sharing at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.
• In simplest form Snowflake is a sequel data warehouse, but the key differences snowflake is that it was built from the ground up to run on a cloud platform as opposed to being built on a database on-premise. It is delivered as a service so it is a platform as a service.
• It is a data warehouse that runs entirely on cloud infra and it cannot be run on private cloud or hosted infra it is available on AWS, AZURE and GOOGLE CLOUD
  It is not a relational database so it doesn’t enforce primary key and foreign key constraints.
• It is time to replace your data warehouse, Waiting days or even weeks to analyze your data is no longer acceptable. Your executive team wants real-time insights to match the pace of business, and your data scientists are frustrated by limitations placed on their queries and the inability to load, transform and integrate semi-structured data.
• Modern cloud data warehousing offers a new way to think about what’s possible when you move from on-premises to the cloud.
• Let the features of your existing system set limits on your evaluation of a new solution, consider a more comprehensive approach to exploring all the possibilities your new data warehouse can deliver today and in the years to come.
• Snowflake is an early adopter of Virtual Private Snowflake because it gives us the ability to process data at lightning fast speed and deliver automated, intelligent solutions to customers in real time.

Snowflake is outstanding in managing

• COMPLEXITY: Simple server less, plug and play, Create a database pour data into it and query it using sequel, no need to worry about underlying architecture
• SCALABILITY: Able to support any scale of data, any number of users and is able to support variety of workloads all simultaneously.
• ELASTICITY: Ability to dynamically scale environment up and down in response to changing business requirements.
• COST: It is a utility based pricing model, we just pay for what we use when we use
• DIVERSITY: Where there is need to deal with more types of data, we can host all type of data in a single location.

when starting learning snowflake one find himself asking the below questions..

1. Is it easy to learn snowflake?

Yes, Snowflake provides GUI (Graphical User Interface), which makes easy to learn it. To learn snowflake no installation is required only we have to create the account on snowflake.
2. How much time will take to learn it?

To learn the fundamental of Snowflake usually it takes 4-5 days( 2 hours per day). For intermediate level it take 2 weeks (2 hours per day) to have good command. You can find many course on online learning portal. Snowflake also provides the training  https://www.snowflake.com/education-and-training/

3. What are the prerequisites to learn snowflake?

Below are the basic prerequisites to learn snowflake.

1. SQL
2. Basics of cluster (for monitoring)
3. Basics of cloud storage (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)

4. Is there a free version of Snowflake?

Go to Snowflake website https://www.snowflake.com/ and Sign up for free.

5. Is Snowflake a database or data warehouse?
Snowflake is the data warehouse built for the cloud.  It built on top of the Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. There’s no hardware or software to select, install, configure, or manage, so it’s ideal for organizations that don’t want to dedicate resources for setup, maintenance, and support of in-house servers.

 

NEXT..  Snowflake Architecture Deep Dive