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Snowflake — How does it work?
The article provides a quick view on the architecture, core components and functions of Snowflake, focussed towards the how part of it.
Overview
Snowflake is the leading data warehouse technology. But that’s not all, it provides support for many other data oriented implementations including data lake, advanced analytics, data engineering, etc.
On top of it, it provides many additional features such as data security, time travel, disaster recovery, etc.
The platform is offered as software as a service, which means we do not need to worry about the hardware or software needs of such implementations. Internally it utilizes the compute and storage options available over the cloud. This also makes it a highly scalable and available system.
In subsequent sections, we are going to take a deeper dive into how the platform functions and delivers.
Core Functions
Snowflake platform is based on three core components — Data Storage, Query Processing and Cloud Services. Each of these functions work in the context of the user or the organization and provide an isolated environment to them.
