General Introduction

Basic ideas about Snowflake

  • Separation of storage and compute
  • Built for Cloud environment
    • built from scratch
    • optimized for cloud
    • storage & compute is decoupled
  • Software as a Service
    • No software, infrastructure or upgrade to manage
  • Pay only for used compute & storage
    • Storage & compute charged independently, only for use
  • Scalable
    • Virtual warehouse enable compute scaling
  • Authentication
  • Configuration
  • Resource Management
  • Data Protection
  • Availability
  • Optimization

Unique features in Snowflake

  • Time travel
  • Cloning

snowflake key features

More details can be found at {% post_link snowflake-online-talk ‘Snowflake Online Talk’ %}

Basic components in Snowflake

  • Databases
    • data storage layer
  • Warehouse
    • data computation layer
  • Worksheet
    • query window

Price Model

Storage Cost

  • AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage
  • Based on actual usage
  • Columnar Compression (e.g. {% post_link all-about-parquet ‘Apache Parquet’ %}) or other techniques to save cost

Compute Cost

  • Loading data
  • Processing data
  • Only for actual usage
  • Virtual warehouse can help minimize costs

Data Transfer

  • No cost for transferring into Snowflake
  • Costs on transfer out to other regions and to other cloud platforms

Metadata

  • no cost
  • Database definitions
  • table definitions
  • users permission configuration

snowflake-price-model