What is snowflake ?
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse that runs on Cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. It's great for enterprises that don't want to devote resources to the setup, maintenance, and support of in-house servers because there's no hardware or software to choose, install, configure, or manage.
Customers can utilize and pay for storage and computing separately thanks to the Snowflake architecture, which allows storage and compute to scale independently. Furthermore, the sharing feature enables enterprises to instantly communicate controlled and secure data in real time.
Benefits of snowflake
- Performance and speed
The cloud infrastructure allows auto scaling which adds performance and speed. - Storage and support for structured and semi structured data
For analysis, you can aggregate structured and semi structured data and load it into a cloud database without first converting or transforming it into a set relational schema. - Concurrency and accessibility
Snowflake's innovative multi cluster architecture addresses concurrency issues: queries from one virtual warehouse never influence queries from another, and each virtual warehouse may scale up or down as needed. - Seamless data sharing
Snowflake’s architecture enables data sharing among Snowflake users. - Availability and security
Snowflake is dispersed throughout the platform's availability zones, which are either AWS or Azure, and is designed to function continuously while tolerating component and network failures with minimal impact on users. It is SOC 2 Type II certified, and it offers additional security features such as PHI data support for HIPAA clients and encryption across all network connections.
Creating trial account
Go to the signup location at : https://signup.snowflake.com/ and create an account.
Validate your account via email and create an instance account in snowflake instance.
After clicking on the activation link, you need to choose an username and password.
You will have an unique URL generated for your account as below:
Exploring Snowflake ❄
Now, our account is all set! We can start exploring Snowflake ❄
- Create a new database -
Select Database and click create Table
Next Create a database
- Create a new table -
Select the newly created database
Now create a table with some columns. In my case it's employees
You can see the table created
- Load Data with CSV
Select Load Table
Select Warehouse
Select CSV as data
Select file format as CSV
Select load options
Here, I will skip all errors and load valid data
Finally, data is loaded
Thus we now have our very first hands on with Snowflake.
Hope you liked it. Cheers. 🍻
