Snowflake: End-to-End Cloud Data Warehousing & Analytics

A warm welcome to the Snowflake: End-to-End Cloud Data Warehousing & Analytics course by Uplatz.

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform designed to handle massive volumes of structured and semi-structured data. It’s built from the ground up to leverage cloud infrastructure, offering scalability, performance, and ease of use. Snowflake is not tied to any specific cloud provider; it runs on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), providing flexibility for businesses to use their preferred cloud platform.

Snowflake’s architecture, scalability, and advanced features make it a powerful platform for modern data warehousing, analytics, and data engineering. Its flexibility to handle massive datasets, structured and semi-structured data, and multi-cloud capabilities has positioned it as a preferred choice for businesses looking to leverage cloud-native data platforms.

How Snowflake Works

Snowflake operates using a unique architecture that separates storage and compute, allowing for independent scaling of resources. Key methodology in its working involves:

1. Data Storage: Snowflake stores data in a compressed, columnar format on cloud storage. Data is logically organized into databases, schemas, and tables, but physically, Snowflake manages how data is stored and optimized on the backend.
2. Compute Layer (Virtual Warehouses): Compute resources, called virtual warehouses, are independent clusters of resources that process queries and workloads. Virtual warehouses can be scaled up or down based on performance needs and can run multiple, parallel queries without interfering with each other.
3. Cloud Services Layer: This layer manages metadata, optimization, security, and query parsing. It handles authentication, query planning, and transaction management, allowing Snowflake to offer features like automated scaling, data sharing, and access controls.

The separation of storage and compute makes Snowflake highly flexible. You can store large volumes of data without worrying about compute costs when the data is not being queried. Conversely, you can scale compute resources for demanding queries without impacting the storage cost.

Core Features of Snowflake

1. Separation of Storage and Compute: Snowflake allows independent scaling of compute resources (virtual warehouses) and storage. This flexibility helps optimize costs and performance based on workload requirements.
2. Multi-Cloud Availability: Snowflake runs on all major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), offering cross-cloud functionality and flexibility in choosing cloud providers.
3. Instant Elasticity: Snowflake can instantly scale compute resources up or down based on workload demands. You can run multiple queries simultaneously without performance degradation.
4. Data Sharing: Snowflake offers secure data sharing across organizations or between Snowflake accounts without moving or copying data. This feature allows real-time data collaboration.
5. Support for Structured and Semi-Structured Data: Snowflake natively supports a wide range of data formats, including JSON, Parquet, Avro, and XML, making it easier to load and query semi-structured data alongside structured data.
6. Zero-Copy Cloning: This feature allows you to create a copy of databases, tables, and schemas instantly without duplicating the data. It enables quick testing or development without additional storage costs.
7. Time Travel and Fail-Safe: Time Travel allows users to access historical data versions for up to 90 days, facilitating recovery from accidental data changes or deletions. Fail-Safe provides an additional data recovery mechanism for a defined period.
8. Automatic Scaling and Concurrency: Snowflake automatically manages concurrency, allowing multiple users to query data simultaneously without affecting performance, and automatically scales up or down depending on demand.
9. Security and Compliance: Snowflake includes robust security features such as end-to-end encryption, role-based access controls, and multi-factor authentication (MFA). It complies with industry standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2.
10. Snowpipe: Snowpipe is Snowflake’s continuous data ingestion tool that automates loading data from external sources (such as AWS S3, Azure Blob, GCP Storage) into Snowflake in near real-time.

Snowflake – Course Curriculum

1. Introduction to Data Warehouse – part 1
2. Introduction to Data Warehouse – part 2
3. Data Modelling – part 1
4. Data Modelling – part 2
5. Introduction to Snowflake and Architecture
6. Create Datawarehouse in Snowflake
7. Load Data in a Table
8. Snowflake Pricing and Resource Monitor
9. Loading Data from External Storage
10. Transformations while Loading
11. Copy Options and File Formats – part 1
12. Copy Options and File Formats – part 2
13. Loading of JSON
14. Loading of Parquet
15. Data Unloading
16. Performance Optimizations in Snowflake
17. Caching and Clustering
18. Loading Data from AWS External Storage
19. Snowpipe in AWS
20. Loading Data from Azure Cloud
21. Snowpipe in Azure
22. Loading and Uploading Data from GCP
23. Time Travel – part 1
24. Time Travel – part 2
25. Fail Safe and Types of Tables
26. Zero Copy Clone
27. Data Sharing – part 1
28. Data Sharing – part 2
29. Data Sharing with non-Snowflake Users – part 1
30. Data Sharing with non-Snowflake Users – part 2
31. Secure vs Normal View
32. Data Sampling
33. Scheduling Tasks
34. Materialized View – part 1
35. Materialized View – part 2
36. Dynamic Data Masking
37. Access Management and Account Administration – part 1
38. Access Management and Account Administration – part 2
39. Best Practices in Snowflake