Snowflake
A cloud-native data warehouse platform offering scalable storage and compute for analytics and AI workloads.
In-Depth Explanation
Snowflake is a cloud-built data platform that separates storage and compute, enabling flexible scaling and multi-cloud deployment. It's widely used for analytics, data sharing, and increasingly for AI/ML workloads.
Snowflake architecture:
- Storage: Centralised, columnar, compressed
- Compute: Virtual warehouses (scalable)
- Services: Query optimisation, metadata
Key features:
- Automatic scaling
- Near-zero maintenance
- Data sharing capabilities
- Multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Time travel (historical queries)
- Secure data sharing
AI/ML capabilities:
- Snowpark for ML (Python, Java, Scala)
- Snowflake ML Functions
- Model deployment in warehouse
- Integration with ML platforms
- Cortex AI (LLM features)
Business Context
Snowflake has become a leading choice for cloud data warehousing, enabling organisations to consolidate data and power analytics at scale.
How Clever Ops Uses This
We help Australian businesses leverage Snowflake for AI-ready data infrastructure, using Snowpark for in-warehouse ML processing.
Example Use Case
"Consolidating sales, marketing, and product data in Snowflake, then using Snowpark ML to build churn prediction models that run directly in the warehouse."