Being aligned to a global cloud like Microsoft Azure you have choices. Whether that is Azure SQL Database or Azure Database for MySQL for your relational database, it does not matter that is down to you are your design choices. The point here is that Azure has variations and flexibility with so many choices and this is no different within the “Big Data” analytics space.

Traditionally we all love and know Azure Synapse (whether that’s the SQL pools or Spark stuff under the cover) which is built into the fabric of Microsoft Analytics. Guess what? Again being within a major cloud like Azure you have CHOICES – bringing me onto Snowflake on Azure.

Snowflake is no doubt a great technology and honestly (and surprisingly) has some great synergy with surrounding components within Azure. Think of Azure AD for authentication / SSO capabilities to easy integration setup with Azure Blob Storage for rapid querying of semi-structured data (believe me it is very fast) to its multi-cluster capability for Power BI users, the technology reminds of me a saying I once heard, its just works.

The storage and compute is totally decoupled, their concept of their micro-partitions intrigues the geek in me and their strategy of multi cluster shared disk means its so easy to scale up ,out and across – yes I said across, imagine many compute workloads from different business areas hitting the same dataset with no performance issues?

As snowflake state (in relation to Azure)

“Snowflake on Azure is architected to run on Azure, leveraging Azure compute and storage infrastructure services for data storage and query processing.”

For more information check this page out and if you think you want to know more about this technology ( specifically within Azure context) drop me a comment and I could start a mini-series.