For over 10 years now, data lakes have been with us and helped us maintain our very own storage networks.?
Data, that is channeled from one medium to another every now and then is eligible for transformation often, which has sparked the debate as to whether databases or data lakes are the right options and what you should be using.
The concept of data lakes is compelling as it allows you to withhold all your structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
Data Lakes are such a modern concept that most of the organizations depend on it for proper data management.
However, delivering data-driven insights from raw data has always been a challenge. Even though a common approach was considered, but they still didn?t work.?
That still doesn?t affect the demand of data lakes even though a lot of projects are simply not providing the value they promised.?
Is Snowflake a data lake?
Snowflake is a data warehouse, that is clear by now. So, NO, Snowflake is not a data lake!
BUT, Snowflake is a really great data lake SOLUTION that is of much more value than a regular traditional data warehouse in case most of your data is structured.
Data lake solutions provide a lot of features and you can take benefit from them, just like you can take benefit from Snowflake while still leveraging the advantages of all the features a scalable database can offer.
Even if you have a lot of data in your repository, say images, text, or other unstructured data, then the Hadoop/AWS based lakes are going to perform well over Snowflake as a data lake.
In these cases, the usage of Snowflake could be limited to being a data warehouse.
How has Snowflake influenced Data Lakes?
Tons of organizations are likely to integrate a cloud-based data lake for the sake of storing data from general or sensitive sources. However, to increase the potential of data lakes, you are in need of dedicated dashboards for reporting on your data, running faster analytics, and understand how well your data is eligible to be transported.
To execute these cases, you need relational databases and potential data warehouses, something that Snowflake could provide!
Snowflake is a cloud data platform that provides great solutions that are capable of performing the best and consist of self-service capabilities.
It allows users to access cost-effective solutions and store any volume of data. Along with that, it has the ability to process structured and semi-structured data as well.
It is built for the cloud and could be delivered as a service. Snowflake provides great ease for dealing with semi-structured data and handling JSON. With a cloud-built data warehouse, a data lake can offer great insights with very little overheads.
With the help of a standard SQL interface, the discovery of value hidden within the data lakes becomes easier and far more convenient.
It even allows the delivery of the data-driven insights to the business users and offers a variety of benefits that organizations are looking for in their data lake projects.
While the data lake technologies are more than compatible with SQL, a lot of similar data warehouses like Snowflake are providing improvisation over the data lake features.
These include cheap storages, unlimited scalability, and data support at the same time. This is the main reason why Snowflake is becoming a great data lake solution.