What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is organization-ready cloud based data warehouse which enables users to store and retrieve massive amount of data across the infrastructure without compromising its features. Snowflake brings a ready-to use analytical data warehouse served as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Users need not to worry about any hardware, software, installation, configuration or maintenance , everything is managed by Snowflake. This is easy to use, faster and even more flexible in comparison with the traditional data warehouses. So, these things make it ideal for the enterprises that don’t want to engage their resources for setup and support.

It uses a completely new SQL query engine with a modern architecture specifically designed for the cloud.

Snowflake Architecture

Snowflake architecture consists of three layers and each of them can be independently scalable: Database Storage, Query Processing, Cloud Services.

Figure 1 : Snowflake Architecture

Database Storage: Snowflake holds all the optimized structured and semi-structured data in cloud storage. This layer stands on its own separate of compute resources.

Query Processing: The data objects stored in database storage are only accessible through SQL query operations executed using Snowflake. Query execution runs in the processing layer.

Cloud Services: This layer is a collection of services that coordinates activities across Snowflake.Services managed in this layer include Authentication, Infrastructure management, Metadata management, Query parsing and optimization, Access control.