Snowflake: Reinventing the Data Warehouse for the Cloud

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Traditional data warehouse technology comes from an earlier era. These on-premises systems focused on providing out-of-date access to structured data.

Today, enterprises need rapid access to data of different levels of structure, and they want the scalability and elasticity benefits of the cloud.

Snowflake offers a cloud-native data warehouse that meets these needs. The vendor architected its technology with the cloud in mind, so it provides the elasticity and horizontal scalability across both the compute and storage aspects of the platform.

Snowflake also offers its data warehouse ‘as a service’ (DWaaS), hiding most administration and tuning duties from its customers. It also provides SQL access to both structured and semi-structured data (like JSON), and can make data available for queries in as little as five minutes.

Snowflake currently runs in AWS, competing head to head with Amazon Redshift (an Azure version is also in the works). Unlike Redshift, however, Snowflake built its data warehouse ground up for the cloud for better scalability than Amazon itself can provide.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

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