Snowflake: The New Cloud-based Data Warehousing Paradigm

I fly to Boston regularly for business and often sit in its notorious traffic. The city is old and the roads are narrow with cars trying to zip down streets built for horses and carriages. There’s no grid (like Chicago or New York) so there’s no easy way to get from one end of the city to the other. It’s easy to look around and wonder how city officials will plan for Boston’s future development and optimize for growth in a way that makes sense.

Like the City of Boston, many businesses already have systems and architecture in place thus requiring companies to build “go-arounds” in order to be successful. But unlike Boston, business can choose to completely change their system – start fresh – and disrupt their organizations for the better.

The data warehouse database Snowflake does just that, allowing businesses to completely overhaul their data warehouse systems. To me, Snowflake is the summary of many years of data-warehousing progress. It really shows how when you redefine an MPP (performance-type database) for the Cloud, with full elasticity and scalability, as well as unlimited concurrency, you can reduce your Cost of Ownership and your overall capital investment. It’s a win-win for everyone.  

Here are some more reasons why Snowflake is a best-in-class product.

First and foremost, Snowflake was built for the Cloud. You don’t have finesse the software and do work-arounds. It also keeps the ANSI SQL standards and is extremely feature-rich.

Think about the Boston example. Due to geological constraints, the city doesn’t have the flexibility – or space, frankly – to grow as it needs to. Developers shove new developments into places that fully can’t meet their needs. And Bostonians are the ones who feel the effects – and struggle to find “new ways” around new congestion.

In the same way, IBM, Teradata, Google Big Query, and Amazon RedShift also moved to the Cloud. While their products have evolved for the Cloud, their structures’ flexibility comes with a lot of overhead. It’s kicking the can down the one of Boston’s narrow roads: it’s the same can and all the problems that existed on-prem still exist in the Cloud with those solutions. Not so with Snowflake.

When you build a database, you must consider your organization’s big events that will, as a result, run big queries. Year end, month end, you name it — you’ll need all the “horsepower” available to you to run these queries.