What is the Snowflake Data Cloud?

Snowflake Data Cloud

Snowflake is built on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google cloud infrastructure. No such hardware or software is there to choose, fix, configure. Hence, it’s ideal for organizations that don’t want to dedicate resources for setup, maintenance, and support of in-house servers.

The Snowflake architecture allows storage and computing to scale independently, so customers can use and pay for storage and computation separately.

Snowflake architecture: the real differentiator

The snowflake architecture allows similar flexibility with larger data. Snowflake separates storage and computing tasks. Users can pay up or down as needed and only pay for the resources they use. Snowflake architecture consists of three layers, each of which can be measured independently:

1- Database storage

It contains all the data loaded, including structured and semi-structured data. Snowflake handles all aspects of data storage: organization, file size, compression, metadata and statistics.

2- Calculation layer

It includes virtual warehouses that perform the data processing tasks required for queries.

3- Cloud services

It uses ANSI SQL and synchronizes the entire system. It eliminates the need for manual data warehouse maintenance and tuning. Services in this layer:

1. Authentication and access control
2. Infrastructure and metadata management
3. Query parsing and optimization

Some Snowflake benefits for your business

1- Performance and speed

The elastic nature of the cloud means that if you want to load data faster or run more queries, you can upgrade your virtual warehouse to take advantage of additional computing resources.

2- Storage and support for structured and semi-structured data

Snowflake automatically optimizes how data is stored and queried.

3- Currency and accessibility

Snowflake solves concurrency problems with its unique multicluster architecture. Data analysts can track what and when they need it without waiting for other loading and processing tasks to be completed.

4- Seamless data sharing

It allows companies to share data seamlessly with any data user.

Conclusion

Snowflake is distributed across availability zones on the platform on which it operates – AWS or Azure – and is designed to work consistently with minimal impact on customers and withstand component and network failures.

snowflake data cloud