Managing and storing data is today considered a crucial function for business operations. Picking a data platform that flawlessly handles gigantic volumes of big data with reliability and high speeds is the key. A lot of enterprises already use a cloud data platform. Many, however, are evaluating if data migration might be necessary for staying competitive. Here we will discuss what is Snowflake and its important factors.
Snowflake is amongst the most popular data platforms. It works as a cloud data warehouse. Its ability to offer unprecedented support for multi-cloud infrastructure environments makes it so popular. The question that this blog is centered around is 'what is Snowflake'. Many of its aspects are discussed too.
So, what is Snowflake? It was published in 2012 and is a leading fully managed SaaS. It offers a single platform for data lakes, data warehousing, data science, data engineering, and data application development. It also offers security while sharing and consuming real-time or shared data. Its out-of-the-box features and third-party tools support handling the growing needs of enterprises.
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Still wondering 'what is Snowflake used for'? It's quite an important question since understanding its applications helps in using it better. These are top uses-
Structured and semi-structured data gets streamed into the business from various sources. Data ingestion at a considerable speed can be a hectic task because of the influx of data. Data sets that need continuous ELT or ETL of the data are also becoming challenging.
Its Snowpipe service offers continuous data ingestion. It thus enables companies to load the data from outside storage locations like S3, Azure Blob and GCP (Google Cloud Platform) bucket immediately upon becoming available to stage. Employing auto ingest as well as configuring cloud provider notification facilitates continuous data loading in tables.
Data warehousing is an integral aspect of any BI operation. Enterprises use this platform to implement data warehouses faster. This is usable for ad-hoc analysis through running SQL queries. It is easily integratable with BI tools like Looker, QuickSight, Tableau and PowerBI.
Many enterprises use Machine Learning algorithms for making predictions around data. Feature engineering needs data engineers for building, testing and picking apt attributes for ML models. The real challenge after models are deployed is a huge quantity of clean, historical and new data. This ensures ML model accuracy. Its zero-copy cloning feature copies complete data sets to support every experiment.
Apache Spark can be utilized as well as directly integrated with this platform. This helps quickly prepare data and build Machine Learning models. It supports programming languages like Python, Java, C++ and R.
Data security and governance play an important role around a company's sensitive data. It can be challenging and cumbersome to safeguard the data from internal and external data breaches with a traditional data warehouse. This platform supports unprecedented connectivity with many third-party data governance tools. These include Collibra, Immuta, Informatica and others. It helps in protecting the data and inserts data access controls with policies.
How does Snowflake work is a valid question that's often asked. The answer is simply with the help of its unique architecture. It separates storage, cloud services and compute to optimize performance and cost while supporting data modernization. Its core characteristics are-
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The long list of Snowflake features is what makes this platform so widely accepted. Here are the ones to learn about-
Its innovative data sharing prowess empowers sharing live and updated data with internal and external partners. It all happens in an efficient and secure manner. It breaks down data silos to foster a highly collaborative environment for informed decision-making.
Its groundbreaking elasticity ensures that resources are optimally aligned with business requirements. Be it long-term growth or sudden spikes in demand, its elastic scaling is brilliant. It delivers amazing performance without pinching the pocket.
Its zero-copy cloning feature is what makes creating, testing, and deploying data environments a breeze. All this happens without any impact on the performance or storage. Running experiments, troubleshooting issues and developing new features makes zero-copy cloning apt for maximum agility and efficiency.
Its exceptional integration capabilities and compatibility helps unlock the true potential of a data stack. One can connect seamlessly with plenty of popular ETL, data visualization and BI tools. It empowers businesses to utilize preferred cloud providers with its cloud-agnostic architecture.
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When answering the question 'What is Snowflake?', it's important to tap into the benefits of Snowflake too. Let's see some perks companies enjoy with this data warehouse.
It is a cloud data warehouse. In short, one doesn't have to invest in any expensive hardware for storing and analyzing data.
Users can easily create an unlimited quantity of virtual warehouses. Each one could run its own workload as opposed to the data in its DB. The quantity of nodes in each cluster can be resized quickly and easily for optimal performance. Connectivity is improved and database storage is optimized.
This data warehouse comes with many top industry-oriented data security features. This includes multi-factor authentication, automatic 256-bit AES encryption and IP allow and block lists. This platform is also compliant with data security standards like HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 1, PCI DSS and SOC 2.
Built-in automatic query performance optimization is included through a query optimization engine. Users do not even need to manually change the settings.
Control who gets access to sensitive data. This prevents even insiders from viewing any sort of confidential information.
'What is Snowflake' is quite an important question to get started in this field. There are many things that data has done and one of them is creating numerous job opportunities. As data warehouses like this one grow in popularity, the demand for its professionals grows too.
Snowflake is a database. An enterprise's uploaded semi structured and structured data sets are compiled here for processing and analysis.
It supports transformation both during (ETL) as well as after (ELT) loading.
Course Schedule
| Course Name | Batch Type | Details |
| Snowflake Training | Every Weekday | View Details |
| Snowflake Training | Every Weekend | View Details |
