Snowflake: What Is Data Warehousing?
By Shane Vogel
It’s the season of giving right now, and whether it’s through providing large enterprises with reliable data management, or through enriching shareholders from rapid growth in the stock market, Snowflake (the company, not an actual snowflake) sure is doing a lot of it. In this recent year, Snowflake, run by CEO Frank Slootman, has found immense success within the present-day landscape of digital economics. For those who don’t know; Snowflake is a “data warehousing” company, which has a relatively simple premise.
Data warehousing is, in short, the storage of data being auto-collected from various sources, typically specialized for businesses. But--through advanced programs, analytic technologies, and a utilization of trained AI this stored data is sorted, and made easy to access by those who need it. But what kinds of “data” is being stored in data warehouses? Well, considering that this data is used by private corporations, pieces of data can come in the form of transaction histories, sales numbers, revenue, spending - pretty much anything having to do with the word “business”. As for how this data is used, those with access to the data can use it to do stuff such as important financial and commercial decisions. Data warehousing is also very popular to business analysts and data scientists.
What makes Snowflake so special, though? Or, should I say, a “special Snowflake”? As a matter of fact, Snowflake was apparently the one of the first to figure out how to “separate computer data storage from computing”. In other terms, the company was able to link the influx of data from their service users to the cloud, while being able to protect it when accessed from risky places, such as public domains. Apart from its core fundamentals, Snowflake was able to skyrocket in success during the coronavirus pandemic, when a lot of people couldn’t access their business’ data from, for example, a physical PC or such at the office.