The Snowflake Data Cloud is one of the most prominent data platforms on the market. It’s made a name for itself as a simple, scalable, fast and feature-rich solution, and has become one of the most requested products in our portfolio.
While Snowflake’s reputation was already firmly established before its IPO in 2020, the success of this transaction launched the company into the stratosphere. Not only was its IPO one of largest software IPOs at the time, it’s also become one of the top 10 IPOs in history. With an opening price of $120 per share, Snowflake hit over $300 per share within 24 hours, making it the largest company to double its market cap on opening day.
A few years later, Snowflake’s share price might have shifted to something more in line with market trends, but it hasn’t lost its standing. On the contrary. Here’s why so many Tahola customers are choosing Snowflake every day.
Simplicity and seamlessness
Snowflake has become synonymous with simplicity and seamlessness, and for good reason.
“A lot of the headache associated with setting up a data platform from scratch is taken away with Snowflake,” explains Nick Baker, Tahola’s Director of Professional Services. “Snowflake is easy to set up, start rolling with, and use, and requires no maintenance or management. You don’t have to create clusters of servers to operate on, and you don’t have to spin up more storage when you need it. Snowflake takes care of all of that.”
Snowflake is aware that moving from an on-premises environment to the cloud can be daunting because of the variety of different technologies and approaches involved. For companies that don’t have a lot of data expertise, or a large internal IT function, this process can be so intimidating as to be off-putting.
“But Snowflake removes all of the complexity you might expect,” Nick continues. “Simply create a Snowflake tenant, and Snowflake handles the hardware, storage and workloads. There’s no need to recruit an entire team to help you figure things out — Snowflake does it all for you.”
Scalability and speed
Snowflake also has remarkable elasticity. It’s designed to adapt to your business, and to accommodate all the changes you may need as you scale up or down in environment size.
And it’s blisteringly quick, too. Snowflake holds its own performance-wise in almost any situation, even compared to other heavyweights. And it’s particularly fast when you compare it to its price point (we’ll get there in a minute). For the amount you pay, its speed can’t be beat.
Its powerful performance includes real-time data streaming as well, giving you up-to-the-minute insight on your information.
Data sharing
One of the most impressive features of Snowflake is its data sharing capability. If one of your suppliers is a Snowflake user, for example, you can access their data through Snowflake share. In this, there’s no requirement for you to move data at all. Through Snowflake share, the data stays with your supplier, but a copy is shared through a link, which you can interact with and use in your analysis and decision-making.
In other words, this shared data is immediately available in your Snowflake tenant, without taking up resources in your Snowflake account.
Although fairly common in other data-sharing scenarios, the fact that you are neither paying for this service nor using up space on your account makes it a rather unusual configuration in databases at this scale.
Of course, this goes to our point earlier about how seamless Snowflake is to use — not only when you bring on board it, but consistently throughout the user journey, too.
Cost
Snowflake bases its rates on usage, so the more you use, the more you pay. “This means you can manage the money you spend down to the second,” says Nick. “If you run a query and it takes three seconds, you know you’re only paying for three seconds of compute power.
“Compared to other cloud solutions where you might have to provision some compute for a minimum amount of time, or account for servers spinning up and down, Snowflake does all that automatically. You can get it to auto shutdown and auto resume your compute so that you pay the absolute minimum for your usage.”
This helps Snowflake keep costs as low as possible. The process is also simple (did we mention how simple Snowflake is to use?) and transparent.
Want to find out more?
Snowflake is a remarkably powerful data warehousing, data application, data engineering and data storage platform. As Snowflake service providers, we enjoy how much we can do with it — and how quickly — including amending existing data structures, rapidly reloading data, and implementing changes without affecting our customers’ live environments.
Snowflake Data Cloud’s benefits are especially apparent if you’re an on-premises data warehouse user who’s considering moving your SQL server environment to the cloud. If this is you, or if you’re a new start-up endeavouring to make your business cloud-first (just like Snowflake did at the very beginning), you’re sure to love its many features.
Curious to put it to the test? We’re here to help. Simply get in touch with one of our Snowflake experts and we’ll take care of the rest.