5 Reasons, Why snowflake is a 5-star

(*****) Cloud Data Warehouse

Published on May 13, 2020

Deepak Rajak Follow

Data Engineering /Advanced A… 124 10 0

I have started exploring Snowflake for one of our client off late. Though these are early
days for me exploring on snowflake but some of the out of the box capabilities make me

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 convince that Snowflake is the Cloud Data Warehouse of the future and I see more and
more organizations start moving into Snowflake both as a Data Lake and Data
Warehouse platform.

So, What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a cloud data warehouse built on top of the public cloud (AWS / Azure /
GCP ) infrastructure and is a true software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. There is no
hardware (virtual or physical) for you to select, install, configure, or manage. There is
no software for you to install, configure, or manage. All ongoing
maintenance, management, and tuning is handled by Snowflake.

Below are the 5 compelling reasons to start your organisation’s cloud Data-warehouse
journey today.

1. True Separation of Storage and Compute

Snowflake’s offers an unique architecture which decouples the storage and compute
functions, which means organisations that have high storage demands but less need for
CPU cycles, or vice versa, don’t have to pay for an integrated bundle that requires them
to pay for both. Users can scale up or down as needed and pay for only the resources

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 they use. Storage is billed by terabytes stored per month, and computation is billed on a
per-second basis.

Snowflake architecture consists of three layers, each of which is independently scalable:

storage, compute, and services.

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2. Zero – Copy Cloning

Snowflake utilizes the limitations of Amazon S3. Data is stored in micro partitions
which are basically S3 files. Since S3 files are not changeable, every DML statement
that makes changes to data requires a new S3 file to be created, which replaces the old
one.

Snowflake simply does not delete the original file but keeps it for a period of time (how
long depends on which edition of the database is used).

Snowflake takes advantage of the need to replace entire S3 files when data is changed.

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 If a zero-copy clone of a table is created the clone uses no storage because it shares the
existing micro-partitions of the original table at the time it was cloned. For the cloned
table, only pointers are set which point to the micro partitions of the existing table.

Data can then be inserted, deleted, or updated in the clone independently from the
original table. Each change to the clone causes a new micro-partition which is owned by
the clone.

create table trips_dev clone trips;

3. Data Share

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Every organization has data that’s worth sharing. However, current data sharing
methods like e-mail, FTP, EDI, or APIs are cumbersome, time consuming, and slow,
preventing organizations from producing value from their data.

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 Snowflake has taken an entirely new approach that will revolutionize how people
distribute and consume shared data. Now, any enterprise can securely share and govern
any part of its data warehouse, with anyone, all without the delays, cost and friction of
existing methods.

Secure Data Sharing enables account-to-account sharing of data through Snowflake

database tables, secure views, and secure UDFs.

The principal participants in any data sharing relationship are the provider and one or
more consumers. Snowflake enables the sharing of databases through shares, which
are created by data providers and “imported” by data consumers.

For example, Snowflake uses secure data sharing to share account usage data and
sample data sets with all Snowflake accounts. In this capacity, Snowflake acts as the
provider of the data and all other accounts act as the consumers.

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 4. Memory Cache

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 When a query is executed, the result is cached for a period of time (currently 24 hours).
At the end of the time period, the result is purged from the system.

Snowflake uses persisted query results to avoid re-generating results when nothing has
changed. So Snowflake will return results in no time when you execute the same query
again within 24 hours.

For Example, when we run the below query. The first instance takes 221 ms but when
we re-run it , it just takes 67 ms. Just Superb!!!

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5. Time Travel

Snowflake Time Travel enables accessing historical data (i.e. data that has been
changed or deleted) at any point within a defined period. It serves as a powerful tool for
performing the following tasks:

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 Restoring data-related objects (tables, schemas, and databases) that may have been
accidentally or intentionally deleted.

Duplicating and backing up data from key points in the past.

Analyzing data usage/manipulation over specified periods of time.

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You can recover the Snowflake object which is accidentally dropped. A dropped object
can be restored using the undrop command in Snowflake, as long as that object is still in
recovery window. i.e. not purged by the system.

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If you accidently update any table by some bad predicate like the below.

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You can very well restore the table back to the previous state ( prior to the update
statements) like the below.

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 No alt text provided for this image

So If you have a diverse data ecosystem , you need a cloud-based data warehouse that
offers nearly infinite expansion, scalability, and ease of use. Snowflake serves this
Best!!!

These were my top five reasons why you should switch to Snowflake today!!

Thank you for reading this, I hope you found yourself informed!!

Credits : Snowflake Official Documentation

Published By

Deep Deepak Rajak Follow

Data Engineering /Advanced Analyti…
ak
R j k
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 Rajak
Hey Guys!!! Want to know why there is a lot of budge about #Snowflake. I have listed 5 reasons why it's a Data
warehouse for the future. #snowflake #dataengineering #virutalwarehouse #storage #compute #timetravel
#datashare #memorycache #zerocopycloning #exusia Exusia, Inc.

10 comments

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Vivek . 1mo
Vivek . Database Developer | Oracle/SQL /PLSQL |

Very informative
Like Reply

Rambabu Posa 1mo

RambabuGCP Data Engineer (GCP and AWS Certified) at Mercator IT Solutions Ltd
Posa
GCP BigQuery has almost same features plus some extra features like no need of data
cache still we will get better results because of underlying architecture
Like Reply

Sivakumar Ayyapusetty 8mo

Sivakumar
ETL - Ab Initio | Data Warehousing | Teradata | SQL | No SQL | Snowflake | Spark | Data
Ayyapusetty
Science |Tableau | Databricks

Nice work Deepak. please keep update on Snowflake

Like Reply 1 Like 1 Reply

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 Deep Deepak Rajak 8mo
ak Data Engineering /Advanced Analytics Technical Delivery Lead at Exusia, Inc.
Rajak
Thanks Sivakumar Ayyapusetty
Like Reply

Anuj Anuj Sharma 8mo

Sharma Business Intelligence | Tableau | Power BI | Cognos | AWS | Azure

SaaS DBs like Snowflake, MemSQL, Azure Synapse have came a long way to fill the gap
traditional databases had compared to No-SQL databases, with added advantages of ease
of use as well as out-of-box functionalities like the ones mentioned in your article.
Like Reply 1 Like 1 Reply

Deep Deepak Rajak 8mo

ak Data Engineering /Advanced Analytics Technical Delivery Lead at Exusia, Inc.

Rajak
Haan bhai Anuj Sharma
Like Reply

ABBAS HEERA 10mo

ABBAS Assistant Consultant at Tata Consultancy Services
HEERA
Excellent Sir
Like Reply 1 Like 1 Reply

Deep Deepak Rajak 9mo

ak Data Engineering /Advanced Analytics Technical Delivery Lead at Exusia, Inc.

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 Rajak
Thanks ABBAS HEERA
Like Reply

Trevor Silver 1y
Trevor
Silver
Nicely done Deepak. Proud to be growing our relationship with Snowflake ❄ globally.
Like Reply 1 Like 1 Reply

Deep Deepak Rajak 1y

ak Data Engineering /Advanced Analytics Technical Delivery Lead at Exusia, Inc.

Rajak
Thanks Trevor Silver Yeah it gonna be a very fruitful and strategic relationship
with Snowflake !! We will continue explore into Snowflake!!
Like Reply 1 Like

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