The concept of data warehousing was introduced in 1988 by Paul Murphy and Barry Devlin who at the time worked as researchers at IBM. However, over the past five years or so, the concept of serverless services such as data warehouses has become all too alluring for both big and small data.
Increasing challenges and complexities of business have compelled data warehousing to establish itself as a different industry on its own. As such, Snowflake has emerged as an industry leader providing on-demand cloud data warehousing.
Snowflake Data Cloud: What Is It All About?
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse built on top of Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. It’s software provided as a service (SaaS) and helps organizations store more data than ever before.
To many users, Snowflake draws many similarities compared to other enterprise data warehouses. However, it has added functionalities that make the service very unique.
Let’s take an in-depth look at some of the advantages you can expect from using the Snowflake data cloud service.
1. It Is Fully Automated
You won’t have to worry about software updates or configuring the system as your users and datasets grow. Snowflake supports modern functions such as data sharing, auto-scaling, auto suspends and can sustain big data workloads with ease.
Openbridge pipelines and data lakes offer an automated, high-standard system that loads data on Snowflake. This will make your team flexible enough to prioritize use cases of data consumption through selected data tools.
2. The Cost Depends on Your Needs
How much you spend on Snowflake is based on the amount of compute hours you use and the data you store. This pricing model ensures business data is ready for analysis and reporting without charging extra system costs.
Better yet, if you use Snowflake with a data lake, you will save money by partition, compression, and converting your data to Apache Parquet.
However, while considering the potential cost of using Snowflake, factor in storage and computing costs based on your query patterns.
3. Snowflake Is Easy to Use
Snowflake’s user interface is known for its simplicity. The system’s architecture is also very efficient and flexible, which is why it is widely regarded as one of the most accessible cloud data warehouses in the market.
Since the service uses modern cloud infrastructure, users can run a high volume of queries with ease. Data scientists and analysts can access the data they need, at whatever time they wish, without having to wait for other loading or processing tasks to complete.
The Bottom Line
Not so long ago, businesses would have to set up a data warehouse and install costly, specially-designed hardware appliances for use in the data center. Operating the data warehouse was also very costly in its own regard and quite complex.
However, Snowflake has really made a difference thanks to its data storage and sharing capabilities. If you run a diverse data ecosystem, you should consider working with Snowflake for its ease of use, scalability, and near-infinite expansion potential.
