Snowflake

Snowflake is a SaaS-based data-warehousing platform that centralizes the storage and processing of structured and semi-structured data in the cloud. The increasing generation of data produced over the world requires modern infrastructure to handle the processing of data.

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Users can easily provision and scale virtual warehouses to execute processing on structured and semi-structured data. Among many features, Snowflake is ACID compliant, supports data sharing and cloning in seconds, allows scaling its infrastructure in an unsupervised approach, and shares connectors with more than 70 third-party partners. Storage-wise, Snowflake provisions object storage automatically on the cloud provider selection during the sign-up process. Using a SQL database engine to allow interactions with its infrastructure, managing data in Snowflake requires knowledge of SQL, which benefits from a low entry barrier.

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Snowflake has a hybrid architecture between shared-nothing and shared-disk models. On one hand, a central data repository is present for persistent data, accessible from all nodes of a cluster. On the other hand, Snowflake executes the submitted requests using Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) clusters, where each node of the cluster stores part of the global set of data. This type of architecture, patented by the company, links the advantages of both models to one solution. Virtual warehouses can be resized at any given point in time (even when running queries), modified in a multi-cluster approach to support more users concurrently, and more.

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Learn more about Snowflake here.