26 Oct 2021
7 min
Whether you’re in the early stages of understanding the power of data and what your business needs to do to harness that power for business growth truly, it all starts with how that data is managed. Understanding data warehousing is essential to moving forward and capitalizing on the data collected. There is so much an organization has to do to contain, control, and protect proprietary data. Snowflake is a data warehouse and Platform with many advantages and has recently gained much attention, mainly because it is a cloud-based warehouse. In addition, Snowflake is non-traditional because it is more flexible and has a unique architecture. So let’s see how partnering with Snowflake can benefit your business.
One of the main advantages of Snowflake over many others is that it is cloud-based, and organizations don’t have to worry about IT infrastructure or hardware to set up or manage. Since Snowflake is 100% cloud-based, no additional administrative overhead is required to optimize performance, data protection, data sharing, and recovery, as everything is integrated. While the implementation is easy, if you previously had an on-premises or hybrid solution and are planning to migrate to the cloud, it’s still a good idea to look to a company like Aptude to partner up. In Snowflake to ensure the smooth running of the migration. According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, the global Platform as a Service (PaaS) market size is expected to grow from $ 56.2 billion in 2020 to $ 164.3 billion by 2026, at a compound annual growth rate ( CAGR) of 19.6% during the forecast period. You can take this as a sign that it might be a good idea to start looking for cloud-based solutions if you haven’t already.
Processing data can be complicated, but Snowflake will save you the headache of mixing, parsing, and transforming data against different data structures that work with SQL as the only language. Snowflake can work with data in structured and semi-structured formats. Since data comes in so many different formats from so many other sources in today’s digital age, Snowflake can work with semi-structured data without transforming it first and is optimized for storage and queries for maximum efficiency. All that
With Snowflake’s architecture, users can query semi-structured and structured data together using SQL. Moreover, comparing and calculating the two in a single query eliminates so many extra steps and optimizes performance.
Snowflake’s overall architecture design allows for a simplistic approach to data management that allows for the flexibility of the semi-structured data schema and relational data performance optimizations. In addition, its design has a database engine that natively understands how to optimize the performance of queries on semi-structured data in the same way it does for structured data. Another advantage is that once the data is uploaded, Snowflake retains the metadata about that data structure and continuously updates itself automatically, even as the data changes. Snowflake’s unique architecture works with semi-structured data from
Another unique feature of Snowflake is its ability to clone data. It’s usually a very difficult and arduous process in traditional data warehousing services. To test changes, perform analyses, create test environments, etc., users must copy and deploy a completely different environment and load data into it. With Snowflake, instead of copying, you can clone databases or tables instantly. As a result, it saves a lot of time and especially money without worrying about storage space. In addition, by cloning, users can create multiple independent clones of the same data without any additional cost associated with it.
As mentioned earlier, the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is designed to work natively with structured and unstructured data and unlimited scale in the cloud. It includes data warehouses, data lakes, and data science applications, providing an excellent foundation to run any workload from a single department. However, where there are silos between data, there are performance issues and barriers to realizing the true ROI of your data and increasing costs.
Snowflake has proven to be the only trustworthy cloud-built data platform for all your business data, providing a unified platform. The number of features built into Snowflake that allows for a more automated process for your data is a key benefit for anyone who needs to work with that data. In addition, having the ability to configure recurring tasks to create workflows allows you to maintain a high-performing system and continuous pipelines.
Snowpipe is Snowflake’s continuous data ingestion service. It provides a way to load new data into micro-batches when it is available in an external step instead of being unique, being a manual process using batches. Most important and using COPY statements.
Securing your data should always be at the forefront of an organization’s mind when considering partnering with any Platform. Snowflake integrates many layers of security for user and group administration, account and user authentication, object security, data security and maintains multiple security validations. Data stored in Snowflake is protected by Continuous Data Protection (CDP), which includes features that protect data stored in Snowflake against several factors such as human error, malicious attack, or software/hardware failure. In corruption, deletion, or modification of data, Snowflake allows the data to be accessible and recoverable. Here are some key security features:
With Snowflake, users can share objects from one database in their account with another Snowflake account without copying the data, thus eliminating the problem of additional storage and space costs. If the other user does not have a Snowflake account, providers can still set up player accounts. Depending on your needs, Snowflake offers three different products: Direct Share, Snowflake Data Marketplace, and Data Exchange to share data securely.
Snowflake has a lot to offer organizations that dive headlong into quality data management in the cloud. Aptude is an IT consulting company that can work with your organization to migrate to the cloud or move to a solution like Snowflake to take advantage of these benefits.
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