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Data Ingestion / Loading

Snowflake Data Loading​

Snowflake offers a simple and scalable approach to loading data into its platform. It supports bulk data loading from various sources, including files, cloud storage, and external tables.

Snowflake Data Loading Methods​

Snowflake COPY Command: The COPY command is a powerful tool for efficiently loading large volumes of data into Snowflake. It supports various file formats and allows data to be loaded from cloud storage, on-premises storage, or local files.

Snowpipe: Snowpipe is Snowflake's continuous data ingestion service. It allows you to automatically load data into Snowflake tables as soon as new data is added to a staged area in a cloud storage platform like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage. Snowpipe uses event-based triggers to load data in near real-time.

Third-Party ETL Tools: Snowflake integrates with various third-party ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools. Popular tools like Apache NiFi, Talend, Informatica, and others can be used to design and execute data integration workflows with Snowflake.

Data Formats and Compression​

Snowflake supports multiple data formats, including JSON, Avro, Parquet, ORC, and more. This flexibility allows users to choose the format that best suits their data and use case.

Compression options are also available, helping to optimize storage and reduce data transfer costs.

Concurrency and Multi-Cluster Loading​

Snowflake's architecture allows for concurrent data loading, supporting parallel loading of data into tables. This enables efficient utilization of resources and faster data ingestion.

Multi-cluster loading allows you to use multiple Snowflake virtual warehouses to load data concurrently, improving performance and scalability.

Secure Data Ingestion​

Snowflake provides features for secure data ingestion, including encryption of data in transit and at rest. It also supports role-based access control to manage permissions for data loading and ingestion processes.

Snowpipe​

In simple terms, Snowpipe is a continuous data ingestion service provided by Snowflake that loads files within minutes as soon as they are added to a stage and submitted for ingestion. Therefore, you can load data from files in micro-batches (organizing data into small groups/matches), allowing users to access the data within minutes (very less response time), rather than manually running COPY statements on a schedule to load large batches. By loading the data into micro-batches, Snowpipe makes it easier to analyze it. Snowpipe uses a combination of filenames and file checksums to ensure that only new data is processed.

Advantages of Snowpipe​

  • By eliminating roadblocks, Snowpipe facilitates real-time analytics.
  • It is cost-effective.
  • It is simple to use.
  • There is no management required.
  • It provides flexibility, resilience, and so on.

Snowpipe | Snowflake Documentation

Zero-copy cloning​

Snowflake’s Zero Copy Cloning is a feature which provides a quick and easy way to create a copy of any table, schema, or an entire database without incurring any additional costs as the derived copy shares the underlying storage with the original object.

  1. Almost no additional storage costs for cloning data
  2. No waiting time for cloning data from one environment to another
  3. No need for administrative efforts, as cloning is as simple as a Select
  4. Since data exists only in one place, it’s easy to maintain
  5. Instantly promotes corrected/fixed data to production

Snowflake Zero Copy Cloning - A Comprehensive Guide | Encora

Snowflake Zero Copy Cloning - ThinkETL