Snowflake Benefits: Why Use the Snowflake Data Cloud?

The exponential growth of data has created significant challenges for businesses, including the need to manage large volumes of data while avoiding the fragmentation of data silos. As companies increasingly rely on data-driven insights to make informed decisions, they seek a comprehensive and scalable data management solution. Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehousing platform offers one possible response to these challenges.

In this article, we explore the key benefits of using Snowflake for data warehousing and how it helps businesses overcome data challenges.

What is the Snowflake Data Cloud?

Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform that provides a solution for storing, analyzing, and sharing data from various sources and workloads. The Snowflake Data Cloud aims to empower users to access and analyze all their data in one solution, eliminating silos and allowing businesses to unify, analyze, share, and monetize their data. Snowflake supports a wide range of applications, including data warehousing, data lakes, data science, and more.

5 Benefits of Snowflake for data warehousing

Businesses choose Snowflake because it helps them solve a range of data-related issues while allowing them to maximize the value of their stored data. Let’s look at five benefits of Snowflake for data warehousing.

1. Snowflake eliminates data silos

One of the key benefits of Snowflake is its ability to eliminate data silos through seamless data sharing. Snowflake provides direct access to live, ready-to-query data across multiple cloud platforms and regions without the need to copy or move it.

2. Scalability

Snowflake is built to work with elastic cloud platforms, and its multi-cluster shared data architecture enables seamless, non-disruptive scaling of compute and storage resources. Data processing and data storage are managed separately, so users can scale them independently and cost-effectively without impacting performance.

3. Flexibility

Snowflake allows users to store and analyze data from a variety of sources and formats, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Native support for loading file formats such as JSON, XML, Apache Avro, Apache ORC, and Apache Parquet ensures that data ingestion is fast and trouble-free. Additionally, with Snowflake's support for unstructured data, you can store, secure, govern, analyze, and share a wide variety of documents and file types, including images, videos, and text files.

4. Security, compliance, and data governance

Snowflake ensures data security and compliance with encryption, access control, auditing, and cross-cloud replication features. Automatic encryption protects data at rest and in transit, while granular access controls ensure that only authorized users can access specific data. Snowflake's robust security features help businesses meet regulatory requirements and maintain a secure data environment.

5. Integration

Snowflake integrates with a wide range of data preparation, integration, analytics, exchange, and security tools, making it a versatile solution for businesses with diverse data needs. Integration allows Snowflake users to leverage its capabilities within their existing data ecosystem, simplifying data workflows and enabling more efficient data processing and analysis.

Keeping control of snowflake costs

Snowflake offers a comprehensive solution to the challenges businesses face in managing large volumes of data and data silos. However, businesses should be aware of the potential cost implications of using a highly scalable, pay-as-you-go platform for data storage and management.

As with all solutions based on on-demand cloud platforms, costs can quickly get out of control as storage and compute usage grow. Businesses leveraging Snowflake will want to ensure they have tools and processes in place to monitor and control spending.

We've covered snowflake pricing extensively to help navigate the costs of the platform further.

Optimizing Snowflake Costs with Streamdal

Streamdal lets you filter streaming data in real-time, selectively loading only the exact data set needed into Snowflake. This means you no longer have to send a billion rows of unnecessary data, Streamdal filters for just the essential 1 million rows needed by your data science or analytics teams.

The benefits are two-fold: you can reduce your storage, transfer, and warehousing costs while also increasing your processing and query efficiency. Learn more about how we optimize snowflake costs. Interested in a demo of this solution? Book one today!