D5.1 - OUTLINE KEY COMPONENTS OF SNOWFLAKES CLOUD DATA PLATFORM

Question 1

What are the data types within Snowflake?

Answer 1

• Numeric
• String & Binary
• Logical
• Date & Time
• Semi-structured data types
• Geospatial data types

Question 2

What is a Snowflake ‘Optimizer’ ?

Answer 2

• The search optimization services that aims to significantly improve the performance of selective point lookup queries on tables

Question 3

What is ‘Continuous Data Protection (CDP)?

Answer 3

• A set of features that help protect data against human error, malicious acts, and software or hardware failure

Question 4

What are some CDP features?

Answer 4

• Networking policies
• Verification/authentication required for users accessing your account (MFA and SSO support)
• Security roles for controlling user access to all objects in the system
• Data encryption (AES-256)
• Maintenance of historical data (Snowflake Time Travel & Fail-Safe)

Question 5

Caching for performance

Answer 5

• Each warehouse while running maintains a cache of of the tables accessed as queries are run, which enables improved performance if queries are able to tap into cache instead of tables for results
• A warehouse cache is determined by the size of the warehouse
• The cache is built up until the warehouse is suspended, at which point the cache is reset

Question 6

Cloning

Answer 6

• Creates a copy of a database, schema or table
• The cloned object is writeable and independent of the clone source. That is, changes made to either the source object or the clone object are not a part of the other
• Cloning a database will clone all the schemas and tables within, while cloning a schema will clone the tables within that schema

Question 7

User Defined Functions (UDFs)

Answer 7

• UDFs may be scalar or tabular
• A scalar output returns one output row for each input row. The returned row consists of a single column/value
• A tabular function, returns zero, one or multiple rows for each input row. A tabular UDF is defined by specifiying a return clause that contains the TABLE keyword and specifies the names and data types of the columns in the table resullts
• UDFs are database objects, they have a fully-qualified name defined by their namespace
• Snowflake supports overloading UDFs, so long as they have argument signatures that differ, either by the number of arguments or the argument types

Question 8

Web Interface

Answer 8

You can use it to:

• Create and manage user and other account-level objects
• Create and use virtual warehouses
• Creating and modifying databases and all database objects
• Loading data into tables
• Submitting and monitoring queries

Question 9

What are the three product offerings for data sharing?

Answer 9

• Direct Share
• Snowflake Data Marketplace
• Data Exchange

Question 10

What is direct share?

Answer 10

• The simplest form of data sharing that enables account-to-account sharing of data utilizing Snowflake’s secure data sharing
• Your data will show up in another account without having to copy it over or move it

Question 11

What is Snowflake Data Marketplace?

Answer 11

• Snowflake data marketplace is available to all Snowflake accounts hosted on non-VPS regions on all supported cloud platforms
• You can discover and access a variety of third-party data and have those datasets available directly in your Snowflake account to query without transformation and join it with your own data.
• You can also become a provider and publish data in the Data Marketplace, which is an attractive proposition if you are thinking about data monetization and different routes to market

Question 12

What is the Data Exchange?

Answer 12

• A personal data hub for securely collaborating around data between a selected group of members that you invite
• It enables providers to share data that can be discovered by consumers; such as those within your business ecosystem (suppliers, vendors, partners etc)