SNOWFLAKE

Snowflake is a scalable pay-per-use cloud data warehousing system. Snowflake combines the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

With data warehousing, all company data comes together in one place, giving analysts easy access to all the data they need to provide the company with the right information. Starting with data warehousing can be a costly affair because an investment in hardware and software has to be made in advance. A traditional data warehouse then needs to be maintained and regularly expanded to meet a growing flow of information and computing capacity to allow all analysts to perform their analyses in an acceptable amount of time.

cimt works with Snowflake to not only provide customers who want to start data warehousing without a large investment, but also to provide customers who already own a data warehouse and want to take advantage of the best performance in the cloud.

Pay per use

Snowflake only charges for the storage and computing capacity actually used. By means of so-called warehouses – interactions with databases – analysts can indicate how much computing capacity is needed to perform a certain query in order to reduce the lead time. The size of these warehouses varies from X-Small to 3X-Large, with processing time halved at each step. The choice of warehouse size can be adjusted while a query is being carried out. Billing is only done based on the size of the warehouse and the time (per second) it was used. The structure of the system allows multiple analysts to perform simultaneous queries and ETL processes without affecting the speed of the system. This form of scalability is unique to Snowflake.

Communication and security

Data is always stored encrypted on Amazon or Azure servers and communication between the server and the client is always secure: there is no alternative. As a result, the data is always secure. Snowflake has servers in Germany and Ireland, among other countries, which means that the storage of this data is subject to European legislation. Communication with the databases takes place through ODBC and JDBC connections, but many platforms such as Talend, Informatica, Fivetran, Looker, Qlik and Tableau also have pre-configured connections.

Management and Upkeep

A data warehouse in the cloud can be set up and integrated in a very short time, which means that the Time-To-Benefit can be considerably shorter than with on-site solutions. In addition, the Snowflake platform does not require database administration. Indexes are automatically created and optimizations (tuning) are applied, so users can focus on the data instead of the database administration. In addition, the Time Travel function exists, which makes it possible to quickly and easily undo the deletion of, for example, a table or entire database.

As a professional partner of Snowflake we’d love to give you insights in the possibilities and advantages of a data warehouse in the cloud:

  • Start data warehousing in the cloud with only a short implementation time and without investing in (software) licenses and hardware
  • Unprecedented performance, even with simultaneous computing
  • No need to worry about database administration or tuning
  • Pay only for the storage and computing power you use, charged per second
  • A data warehouse that you can easily grow with your company