What Is Snowflake Database?

Snowflake is a data-warehousing platform. The startup based in San Mateo (California) has just received a $479 million late round of funding. The newest series raises the capital to $1.42 billion with the company’s valuation now reaching $12.4 billion. The future of Snowflake looks bright, going from an unknown newcomer to a massive tech success story in just 8 years—which is why DreamFactory has developed a custom Snowflake connector as part of its integration suite.

Snowflake provides an enterprise solution that makes the gathering, processing, using big data easy. They compete with platforms such as Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, or Azure SQL Warehouse. While Snowflake can operate on any of the top cloud computing providers, it cannot run on private cloud infrastructures (on-premises or hosted).

Snowflake creates value by providing a full 360-degree data analytics stack for corporations and their partners. DreamFactory integrates easily with the ELK stack which can enable data visualizations and analytics using the Logstash connector. In the rest of this article, we’ll discuss some of it’s specific features and outline some pertinent points relating to architectural considerations to give you a better understanding of what all the fuss is about!

Features

Let’s discuss some major features of the Snowflake data warehouse:

1. Security and Data Protection: Snowflake data warehouse offers enhanced authentication by providing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), federal authentication and Single Sign-on (SSO), and OAuth. All the communication between the client and server is protected y TLS.
2. Standard and Extended SQL Support: Snowflake data warehouse supports most DDL and DML commands of SQL. It also supports advanced DML, transactions, lateral views, stored procedures, etc.
3. Connectivity: Snowflake data warehouse supports an extensive set of client connectors and drivers such as Python connector, Spark connector, Node.js driver, .NET driver, etc.
4. Data Sharing: You can securely share your data with other accounts.

Architecture

Snowflake can deliver results so quickly because it’s a hybrid of traditional shared-disk database and shared-nothing database architectures. Just like the shared-disk database, it uses a central repository accessible from all compute nodes for persisted data. On the other hand, similar to shared-nothing architectures, Snowflake processes queries using MPP (massively parallel processing) compute clusters where each node stores a portion of the entire data set locally. 

This approach combines the simplicity of a shared-disk architecture, with the performance and scale-out benefits of a shared-nothing architecture.

Connecting Snowflake to your DreamFactory instance

You can generate a full-featured, documented, and secure Snowflake REST API in minutes using DreamFactoryOnce you have DreamFactory up and running you will be in the Admin panel. From there you will navigate to the Services tab to connect your database to your API. We have a quick tutorial on how to setup that up here. 

Conclusion

In this blog, you have learned about the Snowflake data warehouse, Snowflake architecture, and how it stores and manages data. DreamFactory can help bring your data from Snowflake to DreamFactory in real-time. Along with that, DreamFactory generates fully documented and secure APIs of your Snowflake data warehouse. 

Terence Bennett

Terence Bennett, CEO of DreamFactory, has a wealth of experience in government IT systems and Google Cloud. His impressive background includes being a former U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer and a former member of Google’s Red Team. Prior to becoming CEO, he served as COO at DreamFactory Software.