Snowflake has become popular from the past few years due to its focus on performance and analytical data storage. It is the go to tool for companies and organizations that are looking to upgrade their data architecture to modern data architecture that is well organized and of high performance. Now clients usually ask for the Snowflakes and what are their features that is making it ahead from other cloud data warehouse solutions. So in this article, we will list those amazing features of Snowflake that makes it different from others.
- Scalability
- Cloud Provider Agnostic
- Concurrency and Workload Separation
- Near-Zero Administration
- Security
Table of Contents
1. Scalability
The multi-cluster shared data architecture separates the storage and compute resources that helps to scale up the resources when a user needs to load large amount of data faster. It also helps to scale down the resources when the process is finished without causing any issue to the service. Clients can first start with the small virtual warehouse and then can scale it up and down according to their business needs.
Related: Snowflake Roles Management
Snowflake has added a great feature that is auto-scaling and auto suspend. Auto-scaling turns on when there is unpredictable resources intensive processing and auto-suspend it when the clusters sits ideal for a defined time period. These two features improves the performance, are cost affective, and gives flexibility.
2. Cloud Provider Agnostic
Snowflake is a cloud agnostic solution that is a managed data warehouse solution available on three cloud providers – GCP, AWS, and Azure. Snowflake cloud architecture is easily fitted into any user’s current cloud architecture and are also available to deploy in regions that are beneficial for businesses.
3. Concurrency and Workload Separation
Concurrency issues were faced in the traditional data warehouse solutions in which users and processes compete for resources that result into concurrency problems. This issue was resolved with Snowflake’s multi-cluster architecture where concurrency is no issue anymore. With this separation, queries generated by one virtual warehouse will not affect queries of other virtual warehouse. In dedicated virtual warehouse, user and application can run ETL/ELT processes, reports, and data analysis without competing for resources.
4. Near-Zero Administration
Snowflake is a Data Warehouse as a Service (DWaas) that allows organizations to setup and manage a solution without need of DBA and IT team. It is free from software installation and hardware to be commissioned. Snowflakes supports no indexes that means there is no need of tuning the database or indexing the tables in it. The new updates are handled by Snowflakes and new features are deployed without downtime.
Related: Snowflake Users Management
5. Security
From users access to data storage, Snowflake has the wide array of security that protects it at all points. Here customer can whitelist IP addresses to manage network policies and can restrict access to an account. On Snowflake you can see multiple authentication methods including two-factor authentication and support for SSO through federated authentication. All of the data is automatically encrypted using AES 256 encryption that is the strongest encryption in the world and is almost unbreakable.
These are the reasons why Snowflake is considered as the best solution for all businesses to organize and secure their data under one solution.