Data Platform Flashcards
What is Snowflake?
A cloud-native managed data platform for data storage, processing, and analysis.
Snowflake operates at the scale of big data and runs as a SaaS offering.
Is Snowflake built on top of existing big data technology?
No, it is an independent technology not built on Hadoop or similar platforms.
Snowflake has its own proprietary SQL query engine.
What does it mean that Snowflake is a managed data platform?
No hardware or software installation, configuration, or management is required by users.
Maintenance, management, upgrades, and tuning are handled by Snowflake.
What platforms does Snowflake currently support?
AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Snowflake abstracts the details of the underlying cloud platform.
What is the significance of Snowflake being cloud-first and cloud-only?
It does not run in any on-premise mode.
Users are not tied to a specific cloud platform.
What is a concern regarding vendor lock-in for users of Snowflake?
Lock-in to Snowflake as a technology despite support for multiple cloud platforms.
Users should consider the implications of being tied to Snowflake.
What determines where data is stored and compute is provisioned in Snowflake?
Regions on each cloud platform.
Users can provision Snowflake accounts on different cloud platforms.
Which cloud platform does Snowflake have the most complete support for?
Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Some features may have limited availability on Azure or GCP.
True or False: Snowflake requires users to manage hardware and software.
False.
Snowflake abstracts away all hardware and software management tasks.
Fill in the blank: Snowflake is a _______ data platform.
managed
This emphasizes that users do not need to worry about installation or maintenance.
