Snowflake Overview
Snowflake is a fully managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) that provides a single platform for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and secure sharing and consumption of real-time / shared data. Snowflake features out-of-the-box features like separation of storage and compute, on-the-fly scalable compute, data sharing, data cloning, and third-party tools support in order to handle the demanding needs of growing enterprises.
The Snowflake data platform is not built on any existing database technology or “big data” software platforms such as Hadoop. Instead, Snowflake combines a completely new SQL query engine with an innovative architecture natively designed for the cloud. To the user, Snowflake provides all the functionality of an enterprise analytic database, along with many additional special features and unique capabilities. Snowflake runs completely on cloud infrastructure. All components of Snowflake’s service (other than optional command line clients, drivers, and connectors), run in public cloud infrastructures. 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 or hosted) as it is not a packaged software offering that can be installed by a user. Snowflake manages all aspects of software installation and updates.
Decodable + Snowflake
As with many of the newer specialized databases, Snowflake operates best when low-latency data is presented for ingestion, optimized for Snowflake. Decodable is the ideal transport and transformation pipeline to get data from where it already exists (database, messaging systems, API) in various formats into Snowflake so it can do its job as effectively as possible.
The following video includes a demonstration of how to set up the Snowflake connector: