This is the first in a series of blogposts on Snowflake, a cloud based data warehouse.

MMS Founder
MMS Raul Salas

Snowflake is quickly being adopted by many companies in their migration to the cloud.  Launched in 2014, Snowflake is quickly becoming the premiere data warehousing solution for businesses of all sizes. As a cloud based service for structured and semi-structured data, Snowflake has, in their own words, “combined 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.”  Snowflake’s strength is the ability to separate storage from compute. 

Their fee structure allows business to only pay for computing services while in use, without the immediate up front cost of setting up a data platform of their own. For example, a data warehouse can automatically shut down when not in use.  Most cloud based data warehouse systems will continue to bill even if they are not being used.   

By building everything on a cloud based infrastructure and reducing the need for costly hardware, users of snowflake are able to capitalize on a fast paced and powerful analytics platform to  streamline their own operations.  Once set up and configured, an  installation could be administered without a full time database administrator and SAN storage administrator.

Furthermore, Snowflake can be a strong replacement for SQL Server, Hadoop, and Vertica in a data warehouse use-case setting. Snowflake compliments Mongodb by easily loading Json document data natively without requiring transformation to a fixed relational schema, saving time and headaches along the way. Snowflake also handles json data far easier than providers like AWS Redshift due to the storage of native json.  Mongodb data can be copied into Snowflake in small batches every few minutes to lower the performance impact on the databases; this increases response and uptime of the Snowflake data warehouse. With unlimited storage, the need to work with an internal team or an on premises group becomes redundant. In short, Snowflake is the premiere cloud based database in terms of performance factor and total cost of ownership. It is definitely a player to watch in the emerging database scene.

If this sounds too good to be true, sometimes a good thing can be true.  in future blogposts, more in-depth technical deep dives.

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