Mastering Snowflake’s Architecture

For as long as databases have existed, they have faced recurring challenges in managing concurrency and scalability in the face of growing data volume and processing demands. Many innovative designs have been attempted over the years and have been met with varying degrees of success. However, that success often came with fresh drawbacks.

The Snowflake team saw that overcoming the age-old challenges of handling independent consumption demands of data storage and analysis required a radically new approach. The team decided to design a database that could operate natively on top of cloud computing platforms and thereby offer near-limitless scalability. Their efforts resulted in the creation of what Snowflake calls the Data Cloud—a platform that enables real-time data sharing and on-demand workload sizing through the separation of storage and compute.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Explore how databases...