Snowflake cloud data warehouse now brings its platform to Microsoft Azure. 
This is another choice for Microsoft-friendly enterprises as more companies move their data and analytics workloads to the cloud.
Snowflake provides a full-scale data warehouse in the cloud and has been getting a lot of attention in the big data arena. Its Azure-friendly software integrates with Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Store, and Power BI.
Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia is an industry veteran with decades of experience building enterprise platforms. At Microsoft, he was instrumental in transforming SQL Server into an enterprise database. Since Muglia worked at Microsoft for more than 20 years, it’s not surprising that Microsoft is Snowflake’s second partner after working with only AWS since its inception.
Snowflake’s innovations break down the business and technology barriers that organizations have with many data warehouse vendors. Snowflake provides a unique set of qualities built for leveraging all the capabilities of the cloud.
- Data Integration – Snowflake creates a single source of truth to easily store, integrate and extract critical insight from petabytes of structured and semi-structured data (JSON, XML, AVRO).
- Unlimited Users – Provides access to an architecturally unlimited number of concurrent users and applications without eroding performance.
- Zero management – Snowflake reduces complexity with built-in performance, so there’s no infrastructure to tweak, no knobs to turn and no tuning required.
- Support for SQL database – Snowflake supports the tools millions of business users already know how to use today. You can easily load Microsoft SQL Server data into Snowflake tables, as standalone jobs or as part of sophisticated integration orchestrations.
Snowflake leverages Azure infrastructure services for data storage and query processing. The platform offers limitless storage accounts, accelerated networking, and storage soft delete.
How does all of this happen? The Snowflake cloud data warehouse uses Azure Storage and Blobs to store raw data. Snowflake’s Snowpipe service can ingest streaming data that lands in Azure Blob storage. Unstructured and semi-structured data can also be ingested via Azure Data Lake. The compute layer takes advantage of the beefy virtual machines on Azure that deliver the horsepower required for processing. Finally, Microsoft customers can use Power BI Desktop for visualizing the results from Snowflake.
The Snowflake Azure partnership offers a high-performance option for customers implementing analytics in the cloud. DesignMind is a long-standing Microsoft Gold Partner with extensive experience in Azure, SQL Server, and Power BI. We’re also a Snowflake Solution Partner implementing data analytics solutions using Snowflake. DesignMind’s Big Data team helps our clients integrate Snowflake successfully into their broader data ecosystem.
Mark Ginnebaugh is CEO, DesignMind.