Advanced Snowflake - Snowflake Tutorial

- [Janani] Hi, and welcome to this course on advanced Snowflake on LinkedIn learning. My name is Janani Ravi, and I'll be your instructor for today. Now, since this is an advanced Snowflake course I assume that you have some basic understanding of how to work with the Snowflake data platform. You have access to a Snowflake account and you know how to work with database schema and Abes in Snowflake. Let's get started by quickly discussing what exactly Snowflake is, how it's architected and what's unique about it. How it helps us process huge data sets and performing analytics with just queries in SQL. Here is how you can define Snowflake. Manage data platform, software as a service. available on all three major cloud platforms. Let's break this down because every bit of this definition is important. The fact that Snowflake is a managed data platform means that you do not have to install and set up any software or hardware before using Snowflake. You can simply access it as a service. All you have to do to work with Snowflake is create an account log in and get up and running. And since the Snowflake is supported on all three major cloud platforms you can work with Snowflake where data actually is. Now, the question is why would you choose to use Snowflake when there are so many big data technologies out there? Well, Snowflake is easy, intuitive and very very straightforward to use and allows you to perform large scale data analytics using just SQL queries without the overhead of actually managing your data infrastructure. Snowflake is supported on AWS Azure and the Google Cloud Platform which means that you can use a Snowflake with the cloud provider and on the platform of your choice. You can choose to use Snowflake in the region where your data actually lives. Potentially avoiding moving data to a new provider or a new region. Even compared to other big data platforms, Snowflake is a true SaaS offering very, very easy to use. There is absolutely no cluster provisioning and administration, and there is no overhead of managing any kind of physical or virtual hardware. Snowflake uses its own proprietary SQL engine. There is no software for you to install and manage or configure. Everything is done for you. All of the updates, maintenance, management, performance tuning, everything is handled by Snowflake. Snowflake offering is cloud first and cloud only, which means it's a cloud native solution. Snowflake runs only on cloud infrastructure and is supported on AWS Azure and the GCP. You cannot use a Snowflake on your own premises data center even if you want to. Data processing in Snowflake uses cloud based virtual machines for both compute as well as query processing. In addition, all of your data is actually stored in cloud based storage services. Snowflake's database which is a persistent store of data is actually cloud based storage. Here are the features that Snowflake offers. It's an enterprise analytics software for large scale data processing. Snowflake is capable of processing petabytes of data and is great for the construction of EPL pipelines. Unlike many other big data processing platforms Snowflake does not actually build upon an existing big data framework such as Hadoop or Apache Spark. Snowflake in fact runs its own proprietary SQL query engine which makes Snowflake highly performant and very simple and intuitive to use. And finally, you'll find that when you use Snowflake you get hooked onto it because of its innovative architecture which is designed to be cloud-first and cloud-native.