Snowflake Cloud Datawarehouse is a cloud based data analytic platform delivered as a fully managed SaaS offering.
Snowflake’s Architecture is a Multi-Cluster Shared Data Architecture which is a hybrid of traditional Shared-Disk & Shared-Nothing database architectures.
With the Hybrid Shared Data model, Snowflake has the data management simplicity of a Shared-Disk architecture with the performance benefits of a Shared-Nothing architecture.
Snowflake’s unique architecture consists of three key layers
The data in snowflake is converted into an optimized columnar compressed format and is encrypted using AES-256 strong encryption.
Snowflake uses highly secure cloud storage to maintain all your data.
Query Processing
Query Processing
Query execution is performed in the compute layer which is the ‘Muscle’ of the system where queries are executed using compute clusters called Virtual Warehouses.
Query Processing
Cloud Services
The Cloud Services layer is the ‘Brain’ of the system. It is responsible for 1. Authentication 2. Query compilation & Optimization 3. Infrastructure Management 4. Access Control 5. Metadata Store