Key takeaways
- Snowflake has quickly established itself as a leading platform for cloud-based data warehousing since its founding in 2012.
- The platform supports multiple cloud services, including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, enhancing its accessibility.
- Users can access comprehensive documentation that covers everything from system requirements to SQL command operations.
- Snowflake customers report significant returns on investment, highlighting the platform's cost-effectiveness and value.
In less than a decade, Snowflake has emerged as one of the most reliable platforms for data warehousing. Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski founded the company in July 2012. Snowflake offers data-warehouse-as-a service or cloud-based data storage and analytics services.
Snowflake has been on Amazon S3 since 2014, Microsoft Azure since 2018, and Google Cloud for the last two years. The platform enables data storage, processing, and analytic solutions that are faster, easier to use, and flexible than traditional offerings.
According to Forrester's 'Total Economic Impact Study,' Snowflake customers can expect a return on investment (RoI) of 612 percent and total benefits of more than $21 million over three years.
In this article, we list free resources and tools to help you learn the nuts & bolts of Snowflake.
Courses & modules
Snowflake Documentation
Snowflake Documentation is a go-to resource for users planning to learn Snowflake from scratch. The documentation provides conceptual overviews, tutorials, and a detailed reference for all supported SQL commands, operations and functions.
The module covers:
- System prerequisites and requirements for using Snowflake after setting up your account
- Instructions for connecting to Snowflake using the web interface and other supported clients
- Introduction to the main pages in the web interface and the tasks you can perform on each page
- Step-by-step instructions for using the command-line interface to create a table and database, load data into the table from an external data, and query the table
Check out Snowflake documentation, podcast, hands-on essentials, workshop lab and additional resources.
Snowflake Datawarehouse & Cloud Analytics - Introduction
In this free Udemy course, you will learn about Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse and its architecture. It will teach you how to build highly scalable, high performance next-gen modern data warehouses. The beginner-friendly course covers the basics of cloud, SaaS, etc.
Check out the free course here.
Videos
What is Snowflake?
In this eight-minute demo video, the Snowflake team gives an overview of the Snowflake Cloud Data platform. For a more in-depth demo, you can sign up for its weekly live demo programme here.
Snowflake Architecture - Learn How Snowflake Stores Table data
In this video lesson, Prashant Pandey from Learning Journal unpacks Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse and the basics of Snowflake, separation of storage and computing techniques, and storage architecture (how storage database tables are stored and accessed when you execute SQL).
Getting Started With Snowflake
The Kahan Data Solutions tutorial walks you through the main components of the Snowflake user interface. The video demo covers the introduction of Snowflake, initial view, worksheets, databases, shares, warehouses, history, accounts and account versus worksheet role, notifications, partner connect, preview app, persisted queries and query history.
Books & guides
Architecting Data-Intensive SaaS Applications: Building Scalable Software with Snowflake
Co-authored by William Waddington, Kevin McGinley, Pui Kei Johnston Chu, Gjorgji Georgievski and Dinesh Kulkarni, the book titled 'Architecting Data-Intensive SaaS Applications: Building Scalable Software with Snowflake' covers the entire aspect of data applications and why it matters; things to look out for in modern data platform; building scalable data applications; data processing; and data sharing.
Click here to download the pdf version of the book.
The Founder's Guide to Building Data Apps on Snowflake
The guide describes five of the most common use cases for startups and companies building data applications and how Snowflake addresses the key challenges when developing applications including.
- Customer 360 Data Apps
- IoT Data Apps
- Application Health and Security Analytics Data Apps
- Machine Learning and Data Science Apps
- Embedded Analytics Data Apps
Click here to download the pdf version of the guide.
