A Comprehensive Guide to Snowflake Cloud Data Platform
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse that offers an almost infinite platform for data storing and retrieving. Snowflake’s multi-cluster data architecture is dynamic and scalable made possible by its enterprise-class cloud-based storage systems. The multi-clusters offer access to the same underlying data even while operating independently of each other and without contention, enabling easy and quick running simultaneously of heavy queries and operations. In the modern business environment, data security and safety is of paramount importance as competitors and unscrupulous elements try to get access to classified corporate information. Snowflake provides relief to enterprises as it encrypts all data automatically and offers multi-factor and federated authentication. Taken as a whole, Snowflake goes a long way to strengthen data security in an organization.
A new feature – Database Replication – has been launched recently by Snowflake. Those using the Standard version and above of Snowflake get the added benefits of non-business continuity and disaster recovery scenarios. It ensures data portability to facilitate migrations and includes secured data sharing across clouds and regions. The existing Enterprise for Sensitive Data (ESD) version will now be termed Snowflake Business Critical (BC) edition. It has a new feature called Database Failover and Fallback which offers business continuity. Organizations are charged for this feature only if used. There are several benefits of data replication to Snowflake. • Immediate Recovery in case of an outage – In case of an outage, the Database Failover, and Failback feature ensures instant failback and failover operations for seamless data recovery. Users can initiate a database failover to get access to secondary databases that are available in the region. These secondary ones become primary databases for write overloads. When the outage is resolved, users perform database failback which is a failover in the reverse direction to enable resumption of normal business operations. • Refreshing data and near-zero data loss – Users can decide the frequency and periodicity at which data replication to Snowflake will be run. It helps to meet specific requirements for data freshness (data sharing use case) or maximum acceptable data loss (Business Continuity Disaster Recovery use case). Snowflake replication supports incremental refreshes only. Here, the changes made after the last refresh are replicated only, thereby quickening the replication process. • Real-time Replication – An advantage of data replication to Snowflake is that the process takes place in real-time and in instances of data recovery, the time taken is not dependent on the volume of data. When one region faces a disaster or outage, organizations can immediately access and control data that has been replicated in a different cloud service or region. Snowflake is structured to be a complete SQL database. It works well with Excel, Tableau and other tools that any user will be familiar with. All requirements of the SQL database are met by Snowflake through query tools, full DML, multi-statement transactions, and role-based security support.
