What is Snowflake?

Introduction to Snowflake

Danny Hong

Senior Data Engineer

Your instructor

I'm Danny Hong
- 10+ years of experience as a Data Analytics Engineer
- Worked at Google, Amazon, and Meta
- Expert in Snowflake for data models and big data analysis

Image of Danny Hong

What is Snowflake? (cont)

Snowflake is a leading AI Data Cloud & data warehousing platform
Commonly used by Data/BI Engineers and analysts
Data Warehouse
- A repository for storing large amounts of historical data
- Designed to support historical analysis and reporting using SQL

A chart of an analytics workflow. Source data is loaded into SQL tables in a data warehouse which can be queried for analysis or reporting/dashboard insights.

Why is Snowflake popular?

Data Platform as a Self-Managed Service

No hardware or software provisioning required
Ready to use after signing up new account

A picture showing a newly built car versus a picture of a car being assembled from its parts.

A few Snowflake features to highlight

Supports connection with major cloud providers
- Example: data pipeline for a video streaming app
Ability to unify external data sources together
Data governance controls
- Enforce "least-privilege access"

Snowsight UI

Screenshot of Snowsight UI

Data Marketplace in Snowsight

Snowflake's data architecture

Image of Snowflake's architecture layers including Cloud Services, Query Processing, and Database Storage.

Cloud Services
- Coordinate user activities
Query Processing
- Uses Massive parallel processing (MPP) architecture
- Distributes data and compute resources across a cluster of nodes (computers)
Database Storage
- Stores data in a columnar format (optimized for analytical queries)

¹ https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/intro-key-concepts#snowflake-architecture

Let's practice!

Introduction to Snowflake