Snowflake Redefines the Data Warehouse for the Cloud Era

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Snowflake_logoSnowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, announced the general availability of the Snowflake Elastic Data WarehouseTM, the a data warehouse built from the ground up for the cloud. The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse has a unique architecture that delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms, and the elasticity of the cloud – at a fraction of the cost of on-premises data warehousing.

The rapid adoption of cloud infrastructure and software services is driving a tectonic shift in enterprise IT. That shift is causing organizations to reexamine their data warehousing technology, seeking solutions that are more than just conventional software repackaged in the cloud. By developing a completely new data warehouse specifically for the cloud, Snowflake not only makes enterprise-class data warehousing available with the rapid deployment and elasticity of the cloud, but also delivers new innovations in performance, scalability, and ease of use, which go beyond the limits of conventional data warehousing.

The cloud has changed the game in data warehousing,” said Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake Computing. “However, simply ‘cloud-washing’ a conventional data warehouse misses that opportunity. Organizations want to get more value from their data, not simply bring their current challenges into the cloud, or worse, create problems by deploying complex solutions that force them to retrain their staff and abandon existing tools and processes. From day one, Snowflake has had a singular focus on reinventing the data warehouse, building from the cloud up to solve the data analysis needs of customers.”

The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is an all-new SQL data warehouse delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the Amazon Web Services cloud. Snowflake’s patent-pending architecture breaks from convention by efficiently leveraging Amazon S3 to centralize data in low-cost, scalable cloud storage, while allowing diverse users and workloads to run concurrently without performance degradation. Because Snowflake handles the infrastructure, availability, security, and optimization, users can focus on loading and querying their data.

This release delivers key innovations including:

  • Native support and optimization for diverse data. Snowflake supports both traditional structured data and machine-generated semi-structured data in a single database engine, without requiring transformation and without sacrificing performance or flexibility.
  • Multi-dimensional elasticity. Snowflake can scale data, workloads, and users up and down in minutes, without downtime or disruption, and without impacting performance.
  • Self-tuning service. Snowflake adaptively manages and tunes data distribution, data storage, metadata, and query execution based on actual workloads, without knobs or manual tuning.
  • Extreme data and service availability. Snowflake’s data warehousing service is fully distributed and resilient across multiple data centers at all layers. Data is stored in fully replicated storage and can be recovered instantly using Snowflake’s Time Travel feature.
  • Enterprise-class security. Secure authentication, granular access control, and industrial-grade encryption for both data in-flight and on disk are provided as a standard, always-on feature for all customers.

The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse was created by a team of industry veterans that holds over 120 patents and has decades of experience in databases and data processing at companies including Actian, Cloudera, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Teradata.

Availability

The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse was introduced in October 2014 and is generally available immediately. For more information, contact Snowflake at info@snowflake.net.

 

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