Nowadays everyone is hearing the words snowflake. Every new company is using its data in snowflake and every company is planning to migrate its data into a snowflake. So now comes the first question. What is a snowflake and how it’s different from other technologies?
So in simple terms Snowflake is a Cloud data warehouse, unlike traditional databases and data warehouses which run on an on-premises system like costly high-end servers. But snowflake runs on Cloud infrastructures and infrastructures that come from any of the three cloud providers like AWS (Amazon Web services), Microsoft Azure, and GCP(Google Cloud Platform).
Snowflake is in High demand nowadays because of its niche features like Time travel, data cloning, data sharing, fail-safe, zero-copy cloning, etc. The main aspect of the snowflake is we pay for what we are using in the snowflake. Suppose we are using snowflakes for 10 minutes or 5 minutes, we are paying for snowflakes only for that much time. Another important feature of a snowflake is that in a snowflake, compute and storage costs are separate. This means that if we are using snowflake only for processing some data, we should pay snowflake only for Compute costs, with no need to pay storage costs. If we are using snowflake to store some data, users need to pay only for storage costs. So In snowflake compute cost and storage cost are separated.