Overview
The Snowflake database is a cloud data warehouse offering which is available on Azure, but also on AWS and the Google Cloud platform. In contrast with other data warehouse services, Snowflake has been built purely for the cloud. Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools (formerly known as Azure SQL Data Warehouse) has roots in SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse which was an on-premises solution. Because it’s been built for the cloud only, Snowflake takes advantage of certain cloud paradigms, such as the way it handles storage using blob storage for example. Snowflake positions itself as a “no-management” data warehouse, meaning it’s easy to set-up, configure and administer. Little to no technical skills are required to work with Snowflake, aside from some SQL knowledge perhaps.
Snowflake hasn’t been around as long as Microsoft, but it has been growing steadily over the past years and it has been gaining significant market share. It has been listed as a leader for several consecutive years in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud database management systems. Over the years, Snowflake has continuously added features to its platform, expanding its scope from a pure data warehouse to a full data platform able to handle data of all kinds, such as streaming data or unstructured data, but also more advanced features such as generative AI or machine learning.
Explanation
In this tutorial, we will go over the basics of Snowflake, introducing you to the product but also to some of the different features which make it stand out against its competitors. Snowflake is available on multiple cloud platforms, but in this tip, we’ll be using the Azure cloud platform. Snowflake is a managed service; set-up and billing go through Snowflake. It behaves a bit like a black box, you don’t really notice which cloud platform is used. This also means however you cannot use any Azure credits to play with Snowflake. You can however start a 30-day trial with $400 worth of credits if you want to follow along.
High-level Outline of the Snowflake Tutorial
The high-level outline of the tutorial is as follows:
- Setting up a Snowflake account
- Creating a database, schema and table
- Introduction to warehouses
- Loading data into Snowflake
- Querying data in Snowflake
- Time travel
- Query history in Snowflake
- Other interesting features in Snowflake
- Querying Snowflake from Power BI
- Conclusion
Additional Information
- For more information, you can check out the Snowflake website.
- Or you can take a look at the Snowflake documentation.
