Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehousing company, has gained a ton of traction over the last several years. The firm recently announced its goal of an eventual IPO, and has raised a tremendous amount of funding up to this point. Snowflake is currently valued at $12.4 billion.
What is the Snowflake Product?
Snowflake offers a cloud data platform that provides its users with “secure and easy access to any data with near infinite scalability.” The product’s main competitive advantage is less scale and concurrency limitations when compared to competing solutions, due to its unique architecture.
The Snowflake database runs on a SQL database engine “with a unique architecture designed for the cloud”, instead of relying on big data platforms like Hadoop.
Because the solution is a SAAS, there is no hardware required, and maintenance is handled entirely by the company. This is a very powerful value proposition for companies and users who don’t want the hassle of tuning and maintaining their data warehouse. A solution that’s entirely cloud-based certainly has its perks.
Snowflake also has a “Data Exchange”, which allows customers to share and exchange data sets with employees, partners, stakeholders, and so on.
Who are Snowflake’s Competitors?
Snowflake competes directly with other cloud data warehouse solutions, such as RedShift, Azure, and BigQuery. This article does an excellent job of comparing the tools.
It’s worth noting that Snowflake was named a “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions and Analytics in 2019.
Pricing
Snowflake has a very robust pricing format. The company breaks down pricing first by a customer’s “preferred platform.” You select between AWS, Azure, or the Google Cloud Platform.
Since Key2 Consulting is a Microsoft partner, we’ll choose Azure.
Once you’ve selected your preferred platform, you then select what your “region” is:
Pricing is then broken down into 4 categories: Standard, Premier, Enterprise, and Business Critical. You pay a “cost per credit”, which Snowflake calls processing units. You can learn more about the company’s cost per credits here.
As shown in the screenshot above, Snowflake also offers “On-Demand Storage” and “Capacity Storage.”
Snowflake Free Trial
You can start a 30-day free trial of Snowflake here.
Questions?
Thanks for reading. We hope you found this blog post to be useful. Do let us know if you have any questions or topic ideas related to BI, analytics, the cloud, machine learning, SQL Server, Star Wars, or anything else of the like that you’d like us to write about. Simply leave us a comment below, and we’ll see what we can do!
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