Snowflake : Introduction and Architecture

Snowflake is a very trending data warehouse technology due to its benefits and features over traditional database technology, here we will have a brief introduction to snowflake data warehouse and its architecture 

Snowflake is true software as a service provided with an advanced data platform.    

snowflake does not use traditional database technology; it is designed with a new SQL engine with innovative architecture designed for the cloud.

snowflake is a completely cloud-based data warehouse technology 

 

Now we will see why snowflake is a true SaaS (Software as Service) 

• There is no hardware to select, install, configure or manage 
• No software to install, configure or manage
• maintenance, upgrade, and patching all is handled by snowflake itself

 

Snowflake cannot be run on an on-premise or hosted server

There are two main parts of the snowflake 

• Compute - to fulfill the need for resources to compute or to perform operations
• Storage - service to store data

  

Snowflake Architecture 

Snowflake architecture consists of three key layers  

1. Storage 
2. Query processing
3. Cloud services 

 

Database Storage 

The database storage layer is basically to store and manage snowflake data, snowflake reorganizes data into internally optimized, compressed, and columnar formats. snowflake stores data in cloud storage such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.

data objects managed and stored by snowflake not are directly visible or accessible by customers of snowflake

 [Also read -How to get account name in snowflake ]

Query Processing (muscle of the system)

The query processing layer performs the execution of queries, this layer consists of virtual warehouses, Virtual warehouse is a virtual compute resource, that can be used to process all of the queries.

each virtual house is independent of the other, so the performance of one virtual warehouse does not impact the other's performance 

 

Cloud Services (the brain of the system) 

This cloud service layer is the combination of different services that are carried out across snowflake. 

Below are the services managed by this cloud service layer

• access and authentication
• infrastructure management
• metadata management
• query parsing and optimization
• security

[Also read -Setting AWS demo account]