Snowflake - overview

Question 1

What is Snowflake?

Answer 1

Snowflake’s Data Cloud is powered by an advanced data platform provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Snowflake enables data storage, processing, and analytic solutions that are faster, easier to use, and far more flexible than traditional offerings.

Question 2

What does it mean that Snowflake is a true SaaS offering?

Answer 2

It means that:

There is no hardware (virtual or physical) to select, install, configure, or manage.

There is virtually no software to install, configure, or manage.

Ongoing maintenance, management, upgrades, and tuning are handled by Snowflake.

Question 3

Can Snowflake be run on-premises?

Answer 3

Snowflake’s architecture is a hybrid of traditional shared-disk and shared-nothing database architectures. Similar to shared-disk architectures, Snowflake uses a central data repository for persisted data that is accessible from all compute nodes in the platform. But similar to shared-nothing architectures, Snowflake processes queries using MPP (massively parallel processing) compute clusters where each node in the cluster stores a portion of the entire data set locally. This approach offers the data management simplicity of a shared-disk architecture, but with the performance and scale-out benefits of a shared-nothing architecture.

Question 4

Indicate three layers of Snowflake architecture.

Answer 4

Snowflake’s unique architecture consists of three key layers:

Database Storage

Query Processing

Cloud Services

Question 5

Indicate Snowflake pricing plans (editions).

Answer 5

Snowflake offers four different Editions, each providing progressively more features.
STANDARD (On-Demand Storage)
ENTERPRISE (On-Demand Storage)
BUSINESS CRITICAL (Capacity Storage)
VIRTUAL PRIVATE SNOWFLAKE (VPS) (Capacity Storage)

Question 6

How Snowflake charges for storage?

Answer 6

A monthly fee for data stored in Snowflake is calculated using the average amount of storage used per month, after compression, for data ingested into Snowflake. Depending on file types, compression can reduce the total storage needs substantially.

Question 7

How Snowflake charges for computing?

Answer 7

A virtual warehouse is one or more compute clusters that enable customers to load data and perform queries. Customers pay for virtual warehouses using Snowflake credits.

Question 8

How Snowflake charges for Cloud Services?

Answer 8

The cloud services layer provides all permanent state management and overall coordination of Snowflake. Customers pay for cloud services using Snowflake credits.

Question 9

WHAT IS A SNOWFLAKE CREDIT?

Answer 9

Snowflake credits are used to pay for the consumption of resources on Snowflake. A Snowflake credit is a unit of measure, and it is consumed only when a customer is using resources, such as when a virtual warehouse is running, the cloud services layer is performing work, or serverless features are used.

Question 10

What are Cloud Services and how Snowflake charges for them?

Answer 10

Cloud services resources are automatically assigned by Snowflake based on the requirements of the workload. Typical utilization of cloud services (up to 10% of daily compute credits) is included for free, which means most customers will not see incremental charges for cloud services usage.

Question 11

Indicate Snowflake Serverless features.

Answer 11

Snowpipe
Database Replication
Materialized Views Maintenance
Automatic Clustering
Search Optimization Service

Question 12

What is Snowpipe?

Answer 12

Rapidly ingests streaming data
Is an automated service
Requires no virtual warehouses
Uses Snowflake-managed compute resources, which are paid for with Snowflake credits and are billed per second, plus incurs a fixed Snowflake credit charge per file

Question 13

What is Database Replication?

Answer 13

Seamlessly replicates data across regions and cloud platforms
Requires no virtual warehouses
Uses Snowflake-managed compute resources, which are paid for with Snowflake credits and are billed per second, plus incurs standard storage and data transfer costs

Question 14

What is Materialized Views Maintenance?

Answer 14

Automatically syncs materialized views with underlying base tables
Requires no virtual warehouses
Uses Snowflake-managed compute resources, which are paid for with Snowflake credits and are billed per second

Question 15

What is Automatic Clustering?

Answer 15

Maintains optimal clustering state using defined cluster keys
Applies to tables and materialized views
Uses Snowflake-managed compute resources, which are paid for with Snowflake credits and are billed per second

Question 16

What is Search Optimization Service?

Answer 16

Greatly speed up point lookup queries in massive tables
Pair SOS with smaller virtual warehouses to lower costs
Uses Snowflake-managed compute resources, which are paid for with Snowflake credits and are billed per second

Question 17

What is included in Standard Edition?

Answer 17

Complete SQL Data Warehouse
Secure Data Sharing across regions / clouds
Premier Support 24 x 365
1 day of time travel
Always-on enterprise grade encryption in transit and at rest
Customer dedicated virtual warehouses
Federated authentication
Database Replication
External Functions
Snowsight analytics UI
Create your own Data Exchange
Data Marketplace access

Question 18

What is included in Enterprise Edition?

Answer 18

Standard +
Multi-cluster warehouse
Up to 90 days of Time Travel
Annual rekey of all encrypted data
Materialized Views
Search Optimization Service
Dynamic Data Masking
External Data Tokenization

Question 19

What is included in Business Critical?

Answer 19

Enterprise +
HIPAA Support
PCI Compliance
Data encryption everywhere
Tri-Secret Secure using customer managed keys
AWS PrivateLink support
Database failover and failback for business continuity
External Functions - AWS API Gateway Private Endpoints support

Question 20

What is included in Virtual Private Snowflake?

Answer 20

Business Critical +
Customer dedicated virtual servers wherever the encryption key is in memory
Customer dedicated metadata store

Question 21

What Data Loading options Snowflake supports?

Answer 21

Snowflake supports loading data from files staged in any of the following locations, regardless of the cloud platform for your Snowflake account:
Internal (i.e. Snowflake) stages
Amazon S3
Google Cloud Storage
Microsoft Azure blob storage
Snowflake supports both bulk data loading and continuous data loading (Snowpipe). Likewise, Snowflake supports unloading data from tables into any of the above staging locations.
Some data transfer billing charges may apply when loading data from files staged across different platforms.

Question 22

What can you cluster in Snowflake?

Answer 22

You can cluster materialized views, as well as tables. The rules for clustering tables and materialized views are generally the same.

Question 23

Is clustering keys intended for all tables?

Answer 23

Clustering keys are not intended for all tables due to the costs of initially clustering the data and maintaining the clustering. Clustering is optimal when either:

You require the fastest possible response times, regardless of cost.

Your improved query performance offsets the credits required to cluster and maintain the table.