What is Snowflake
Snowflake is a cloud-based data processing and storage platform that allows you to combine data from many sources. Snowflake is built on top of the Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure and allows storage and computation to scale independently.
Advantages
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Cloud Agnostic
Companies can easily scale their data warehouse through Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and GCP. You don’t have to spend time setting up hybrid cloud systems.
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Performance and Speed
Snowflake is made for presentation. And if you want to load data faster or run a high volume of queries, you can scale up your virtual storage to take advantage of additional compute resources.
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Convenient UI/UX
UI/UX Snowflake is easy to use and very feature-rich. You can easily find old queries you've run, or other user queries that are currently running.
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Reduced Administration Overhead
Snowflake is SaaS, which means that setup, updates, and general management is mostly managed by Snowflake, not your company. Much of this management and scaling can be done by anyone with the appropriate rights, without much knowledge of servers, command lines, or coding.
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Support for Various File Formats
Snowflake supports both structured data and a wide variety of semi-structured data, including Parquet, Avro, and JSON.
Analytics Data Stack Structure
Snowflake Alternatives
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Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery is a PaaS service that supports most of the features of a DBMS. It’s a part of the Google Cloud Platform, where there are several dozen more applications for analysing, storing and computing data.
Read more -
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is columnar cloud-based data warehouse platform, which is useful for systems with a constant load – such as regular reporting and machine learning routines.
Read more -
ClickHouse
ClickHouse is an open-source columnar relational DBMS from Yandex for fast processing of analytical SQL queries on structured big data in real time.
Read more