Snowflake is an analytic data warehouse provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Snowflake provides a data warehouse that is faster, easier to use, and far more flexible than traditional data warehouse offerings.
Snowflake Computing
Snowflake’s data warehouse is not built on an existing database or “big data” software platform such as Hadoop. The Snowflake data warehouse uses a new SQL database engine with a unique architecture designed for the cloud. To the user,Snowflake has many similarities to other enterprise data warehouses, but also has additional functionality and unique capabilities.
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Data Warehouse as a Cloud Service¶
Snowflake is an analytic data warehouse provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Snowflake provides a data warehouse that is faster, easier to use, and far more flexible than traditional data warehouse offerings. Snowflake’s data warehouse is not built on an existing database or “big data” software platform such as Hadoop.
Snowflake’s data warehouse is a true SaaS offering. More specifically:
Snowflake runs completely on cloud infrastructure. All components of Snowflake’s service (other than an optional command line client), run in a public cloud infrastructure.
Snowflake uses virtual compute instances for its compute needs and a storage service for persistent storage of data. Snowflake cannot be run on private cloud infrastructures (on-premises orhosted).
Snowflake is not a packaged software offering that can be installed by a user. Snowflake manages all aspects of software installation and updates.
Snowflake Architecture¶
Snowflake’s architecture is a hybrid of traditional shared-disk database architectures and shared-nothing database architectures. Similar to shared-disk architectures, Snowflake uses a central data repository for persisted data that isaccessible from all compute nodes in the data warehouse. But similar to shared-nothing architectures, Snowflake processes queries using MPP (massively parallel processing) compute clusters where each node in the cluster stores a portion ofthe entire data set locally. This approach offers the data management simplicity of a shared-disk architecture, but with the performance and scale-out benefits of a shared-nothing architecture.
Snowflake’s unique architecture consists of three key layers:
Database Storage¶
When data is loaded into Snowflake, Snowflake reorganizes that data into its internal optimized, compressed, columnar format. Snowflake stores this optimized data in cloud storage.
Snowflake manages all aspects of how this data is stored — the organization, file size, structure, compression, metadata, statistics, and other aspects of data storage are handled by Snowflake. The data objects stored by Snowflake are not directly visible nor accessible by customers; they are only accessible through SQL query operations run using Snowflake.
Query Processing¶
Query execution is performed in the processing layer. Snowflake processes queries using “virtual warehouses”. Each virtual warehouse is an MPP compute cluster composed of multiple compute nodes allocated by Snowflake from a cloud provider.
Each virtual warehouse is an independent compute cluster that does not share compute resources with other virtual warehouses. As a result, each virtual warehouse has no impact on the performance of other virtual warehouses.
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For more information, see Virtual Warehouses.
Cloud Services¶
The cloud services layer is a collection of services that coordinate activities across Snowflake. These services tie together all of the different components of Snowflake in order to process user requests, from login to query dispatch.The cloud services layer also runs on compute instances provisioned by Snowflake from the cloud provider.
Among the services in this layer:
What Is Snowflake ComputingConnecting to Snowflake¶What Is Snowflake Software For Kids
Snowflake supports multiple ways of connecting to the service:
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For more information, see Logging into Snowflake.
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