Snowflake – The Business Benefits

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a cloud native platform that eradicates the need for data architecture, such as data warehouses and data lakes, to be separated. Consequently, data sharing is rendered with higher security. Snowflake is built on top of other platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. As there is no software or hardware that demands installation, configuration or management, Snowflake is a very viable option for organisations that don’t want to commit resources towards setup and maintenance of in-house servers.

The biggest unique selling point, however, lies in its data sharing functionality. Snowflake enables storage and computation to be scaled independently, thus customers can pay for both separately. Therefore, costs would better reflect actual usage. Snowflake also simplifies real time data sharing and governance in a safe fashion.

Snowflake reaps valuable benefits because it often addresses great areas of concern found in old hardware-based data warehouses. This includes but not limited to restricted scalability, data transformation problems and delays/failures caused by high query volumes.

3 Powerful Benefits

Performance and Speed

Snowflake has highly elastic servers/clusters that can be added to support higher volumes of demand and scaled back down as needed. This proves highly cost-effective as data is loaded faster, intensive query completion times are reduced, and the cost moves relative to business demand – which is always a relationship that businesses gravitate to.

Concurrency and Accessibility.

Concurrency, in the data sense, refers to multiple computations happening at the same time, causing fierce competition for resources, which catalyse delays and failures. Snowflake combats this issue with their distinct multi-cluster architecture. Queries from one virtual warehouse environment never affect queries in another. Their ‘scaling’ feature means that extra resources are always supplemented, should concurrency occur. The bottom line is that Data analysts and data scientists can perform their organisational objectives, without waiting for vast periods of time.

Permissions

Organisational members have various data needs and data scope. As a result, databases, schemas and any other element on your cloud service needs to be assigned different permissions, sometimes at a personal level. For this universal scenario, Snowflake makes it fool-proof to set permissions. Utilising an RBAC (role-based access call), permissions are split into different levels of authority with account admin holding the highest rank. Each database and schema can be created under different authority levels, so that user access can be defined by organisational purpose.

The advantage of this is a streamlined workflow, correct resource allocation and a stronger ability to satisfy security legislation.

Final Thoughts

Whilst Snowflake is one of many cloud platforms available, I believe that its most prominent offering is its user interface. Navigation is simple, layouts make ordinal sense and warehouse management is a less tedious task to fulfil. A data warehouse is often linked with storing data – which is not wholly true. warehouses are the infrastructure that crunch data into organisation–ready formats. Following such logic, Snowflake can really elevate your data processes at cost-optimised rates. In a world where efficiency is key, Snowflake could be your saving grace!