The new data warehouse that is now worth $90 Billion in market cap and is running in over 3000 companies worldwide!
❄️ What is snowflake?
Snowflake is a data warehouse as a service built entirely for the cloud. There’s no hardware or software to purchase, install, configure, or manage. This is how it looks like; a simple web page you can access from any web browser even on your ipad.
History
Snowflake is fairly new, it was founded in July 2012 by three data warehousing experts: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski. Dageville and Cruanes previously worked as data architects at Oracle Corporation; Żukowski was a co-founder of the Dutch start-up Vectorwise. Snowflake launched in 2014 to the public, and managed in few years to build trust and acquire large customer base.
Simplicity
I am impressed with the level of simplicity snowflake provides. In few minutes, you can signup and immediately have a worksheet where you create your tables, load data from S3 or Azure and run your SQL queries. If you are running a complex SQL and want more resources, simply scale up your data warehouse to as much as 6XL and get 512 times the recourses provided that you are willing to pay the extra buck.
User Friendly
Not often will you see a progress bar that accurately shows the percentage of completion of SQL query, snowflake does just that. It has one of the best and most friendly user interfaces in the market, with 1 click you can resize your warehouse, X-small, Small, Medium, Large, XL, 2XL, 3XL, 4XL, 5XL & 6 XL. Just like T-Shirt sized, isn’t that cute?
Serverless Architecture
What sets Snowflake apart is its architecture and data sharing capabilities. The Snowflake architecture allows storage and compute to scale independently, so customers can use and pay for storage and computation separately. And the sharing functionality makes it easy for organizations to quickly share and sell governed and secure data in real time.
Storage
Snowflake is built on top of either one of the cloud infrastructures AWS, Azure or GCP so it’s ideal for organizations that don’t want to dedicate resources for setup, maintenance, and support of in-house servers.
The competitors
Snowflake is not the only available cloud data warehouse in the market, it is one of the fastest growing solutions, despite the strong competition with Amazon Redshift and others.
💸 Cost
There is no upfront cost for using snowflake, it works with pay as you go model. A 1 cluster data warehouse of size XS would cost 1 credit per hour which is US 2$ to US 4$ depending on the region and cloud provider used. If you chose to scale up the warehouse to 6XL to get 512 times the resources, the cost will be 512 credits per hour.
📚 Learning and Certification
You don’t training, and definitely don’t need to be a genius to figure out how to use snowflake on your own. Yet if you want to upskill yourself with Snowflake and prove your skills in the market, you may consider applying for the SNOWPRO CORE CERTIFICATION then SNOWPRO ADVANCED CERTIFICATIONS.
💡 What’s next?
You can get 30 days free access to snowflake and use their free data-sets to play around with data and test it for yourself.
I will share the disadvantages of snowflake along with my personal take on the product in coming posts, make sure to subscribe to the e-mail news letter to receive the updates to your inbox on snowflake and other hot topics in the data landscape.