Why Snowflake ?

I remember sometime in 2009-10 when I took on my first Data Warehouse project for one of the banking client, they asked me few usual questions.

Client: How big database server we should purchase ?

Me: What's the expected data volume from source systems ?

Client: Its huge

Me: How many users are expected to interact with DWH solution ?

Client : Many

Ah these use to be typical conversations at the beginning of any DWH projects, where you had to estimate storage capacity, computing power of servers in advance without having any clue on the usages.

To make it little complicated it took us 8 weeks to purchase the hardware and later 2 weeks to setup database and login.

Now fast forward to today's era , thanks to the platforms like Snowflake which has been designed ground up for the cloud. Was part of one of the webinar conducted by Snowflake sales engineering team in 2018. I was amazed to witness snowflake free trial account setup took only 10 mins. I asked ok how about server provisioning ? How do I estimate the right server size ? They said well you can decide at runtime and based upon the workload it can elastically scale up and scale down, also do not worry about storage capacity as we got unlimited storage.

That was really wow moment for me, I could not believe its so easy. Somewhere back of my mind was thinking this may be a sales pitch and works well with there internal accounts.

Back to home I signed up for my free trial account and started playing around, boom I had exactly same experience as sales guy during the demo. ??

I started exploring and learning more about Snowflake after that and believe me they always surprises with salient features which makes data professionals life easy.

Would like to mention few key ingredients which makes Snowflake, a leading cloud data platform

• Compute and Storage isolation
• Supports all three major public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Unlimited storage
• Data Sharing and Marketplace
• Support standard SQL (for structured and semistructured data)
• Snowpark (Data programmability Python, Java, Scala, R)
• Pay as you use billing model

Each day my love and conviction for Snowflake is growing. I know it's just a beginning, would be interesting to see where it goes from here. ??