Is Snowflake Just SQL? A Comprehensive Guide

The Snowflake data platform is not based on any existing database technology or on any “big data” software platform, such as Hadoop. Instead, Snowflake combines an entirely new SQL query engine with an innovative architecture designed natively for the cloud. In the case of publishing here, snowflake-cloud-data-platform is the current acceptance label. And as long as you don't use too many generic SQL tags or other database-specific tags, it's acceptable to use any SQL running on Snowflake.Structured Query Language (SQL) is a standardized format used for querying and managing databases.

Snowflake is a data platform and data warehouse that supports ANSI SQL, which is the most commonly used standardized version of SQL. This means that Snowflake SQL supports all of the most commonly used operations. Snowflake SQL also supports all the operations necessary for storing data, such as creating, updating and inserting.Even with a not-so-large community, it's easy to find answers to all the general and technical questions related to Snowflake, including information about its SQL language, connectors, administration, user interface and ecosystem. Snowflake objects, including users, virtual stores, databases, schemas, tables, views, columns, functions and stored procedures, are created, manipulated and modified using Data Definition Language (DDL) commands.

Snowflake assigns a default schema called public to each database created and, therefore, there is no need to create a schema on your own. While the benchmarks can be configured to work in a certain way and to suit particular use cases, most show excellent results when it comes to Snowflake's performance.Initially built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Snowflake is also available on Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. There is a wide ecosystem of diverse tools, extensions and modules that provide native connectivity to Snowflake. While pay-per-use pricing is definitely an advantage of Snowflake, the solution may be more expensive than that of its competitors, such as Amazon Redshift.

A really powerful element of the tool is that the data stored in Snowflake comes in the form of micropartitions.This means that users have no opportunities to implement Snowflake on private cloud infrastructures (local or hosted). At the moment, there are four Standard plans: Enterprise, Business Critical and Virtual Private Snowflake. Like the no-share architecture, Snowflake uses MPP-based computing to process queries simultaneously and each node stores a portion of the entire data locally. After analyzing the Snowflake architecture and toolset, you probably have a general idea of whether this solution meets your needs.In short, if you want to move your data warehouse to the cloud, Snowflake is one of the best options out there because of its serverless architecture, its full compatibility with SQL, its ease of maintenance and its strong associations with BI and ETL tools.

Snowflake also supports all operations that allow data storage operations such as creating, updating and inserting. All components of the Snowflake service are adapted both to computing needs and to the persistent storage of data running in public cloud infrastructures. At the same time, the solution has more advantages compared to Snowflake as users have to optimize the platform to get the most out of the solution.