What is a Snowflake Data Warehouse?
Snowflake data warehouse, commonly referred to as simply Snowflake, is an enterprise cloud service for managing and analyzing extremely large data sets. It provides a set of managed cloud databases that can be accessed using the Snowflake database management system either through native connectors or custom code.
Data warehouse (DW) is a tremendously powerful analytical tool that's used by a wide range of individuals, teams, and entire companies. It is capable of transforming raw data in spreadsheets and flat files into well-organized data sets that can then be used to run reports and generate insightful information. Snowflake data warehouse is a unique new product developed by the experts at Snowflake Computing Inc. It is considered to be one of the most outstanding DWs in the current business intelligence (BI) industry.
Why is a Data Warehouse Important?
Thousands of businesses are taking advantage of a cloud computing database that is at the heart of their business intelligence monthly reports. This type of database was developed nearly 20 years ago, and has since become integral to the modern data stack. Because such data is so large and only increases as time goes on, a simple transactional database won't suffice.
If you are a data analyst, data scientist or data aficionado; you probably already used Amazon Redshift or Google BigQuery to analyze your big data. Snowflake is an AWS cloud-based, enterprise-grade data warehouse service that provides companies with easy access to their data using well-known SQL-based tools.
What is so special about Snowflake?
Snowflake uses the elastic architecture paradigm, where the only components that matter are your storage nodes. This means no clustering, no master nodes and no dedicated hardware. Data is replicated across two storage makes up a data center, which is referred to as a location. You can add another location that’s far away at another place and this makes it highly scalable and fault tolerant with protection against DDOS attacks.
The Snowflake data warehouse is designed to manage big data and allow users to run different kinds of queries on the stored data.
About Snowflake and Data Warehouses
Earlier in the decade, unstructured data was the topic of the hour. Enterprises were running from pillar to post asking themselves how they could tie their messy data together and get actionable insights from it. The solution, many felt then, was to implement Hadoop so they become proficient in managing and analyzing this kind of data. Fast forward a few years -- ETL tools have proven their worth again and Hadoop has failed to live up to its promise (at least in the eyes of many).
