Snowflake is faster, accessible and more flexible than other traditional and cloud data warehouses. Its design is multi-cluster that addresses concurrency concerns, such as failures and delays. The platform enables secure data exchange with a strong flexible process for operations, ranging from data consumption to monetization.
The Snowflake Data Cloud comes with plenty of inbuilt features or offers easy integrations with third-party tools, making it a complete end-to-end solution for all the data analytics use cases. The blog covers the key features of Snowflake that make it outperform its competitors.
The Snowflake data warehouse is a true SaaS offering. There is no virtual or physical hardware for you to select, install, configure and manage. It also handles ongoing maintenance, management and tuning.
Snowflake completely runs on cloud infrastructure. It uses a virtual compute instance for its compute needs and data storage services. Customers can leverage it as a true pay-as-you-go platform for their storage and computing.
It offers various features, which include –
Security and Data Protection
Data protection safeguards important information from corruption and/or loss and is considered an important concern for the modern data-driven organization. It is designed to protect user data against attacks on different levels of data architecture, including the cloud platform. As a consequence, Snowflake implements two-factor authentication, (client-side) encrypted data import and export, secure data transfer and storage, and role-based access control for database objects. It ensures that the data is always encrypted – even while at rest and in transit.
Performance Monitoring
Snowflake’s web interface provides a query load chart that contains concurrent queries processed by a warehouse over two weeks. Warehouse query load measures the average number of queries that were running or queued within a specific interval. You can customize the time period and time interval to evaluate warehouse performance by querying the Account Usage. We can analyze and monitor account usage with the Snowsight dashboard or other reporting tools.
Backup and Recovery
Snowflake has amazing built-in backup functionality, called Time Travel that lets you access data for the specified date. In addition, Snowflake protects your data in the event of a system failure or other catastrophic event with its fail-safe feature which allows Snowflake support to restore data for you during the fail-safe window. The history of data is stored under time travel for up to 90 days.
Data Governance
Snowflake data governance tool ensures sensitive data maintained by your organization is protected from inappropriate access and tampering. It helps to achieve and maintain regulatory compliance. These tools support a wide range of operations, such as risk assessment, intrusion detection/monitoring/notification, data masking, data cataloging, tasks scheduling, data lineage, and more. Snowflake’s platform and its broad ecosystem of partners, including data governance experts, provide a strong foundation for improved data governance.
Snowflake provides a dynamic data masking feature that helps users to mask their sensitive data while sharing it with others. You can write a policy once and have it applied to thousands of columns across databases and schemas. In snowflake, data masking supports the VARIANT data type field that holds data in JSON format. Snowflake also assists you with data masking on external tables and various additional standard file formats such as CSV, Avro, ORC, and Parquet. Snowflake provides a flexible and extensible policy framework that allows customers to define their authorization logic as declarative policies.
Snowflake offers a feature – Tasks that help users to schedule the daily routine tasks around the clock.
Snowflake has the flexibility to integrate many data lineage tools within its partner network or outside the network.
Access privileges are assigned based on roles, which are later assigned to users. In the Snowflake model, access to securable objects is allowed via privilege assignment, which is in turn assigned to other roles or users. In addition, each securable object has an owner that can grant access to other roles. This model is different from a user-based access control model, in which rights and privileges are assigned to each user or a group of users.
The Snowflake model is designed to provide a significant amount of both control and flexibility. Moreover, Snowflake supports discretionary access control where object owners are considered data stewards. If the policy administrator trusts the object owners to be data stewards for protected columns, then they can use this privilege to decentralize by applying the policy operations.
All these features make Snowflake cloud data the most flexible and extensible platform ever and veer it ahead of its peers. Technovert as a Snowflake select partner has developed customized tools which help both technical and non-technical people to manage their security using our security management application. We also developed a Snowflake estimator that estimates the cost based on the requirements. Apart from that, we customized a monitoring dashboard that shows the usage of credits and resources to help clients to monitor their costs and plan for future budgets based on the historical trends. Snowflake cloud data is a powerful platform that offers you a wide range of features.
We recently hosted a webinar in association Snowflake that talks about how you can modernize your current data architecture and grow your business exponentially. Watch the webinar now.
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