Business Intelligence with Snowflake

Traditional analytics are built on a legacy data warehouse (DW) platform. Development cycles are slow because the DW is often used not only for operational reporting, but also for budget, planning, and audit activity that gives the system mission-critical status. This means proposed changes must go through a number of reviews to assess and manage the impact. In other cases, the mere scale and complexity of the data warehouse limits opportunities for analytical enhancement.

As businesses evolve, the demand for more flexible, fast, and scalable analytics solutions grows. We’ve seen the rise of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) and a growing number of cloud-based tools, signaling that it’s time for a more modern approach. Snowflake offers a powerful, cloud-native data warehouse solution that meets these new demands.

Smartbridge is a Snowflake Partner

Snowflake is a data warehouse built from the ground up to fully leverage the advantages of the cloud. As an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering, Snowflake provides the flexibility and scalability businesses need, without the heavy administrative burden. Its architecture separates storage and processing, allowing for independent scaling and cost efficiency.

One of Snowflake’s key features is its elasticity on demand. Organizations can easily add processing power without altering the database design, and scale back when demand decreases, saving costs. Snowflake also optimizes data storage by using a compressed, columnar format and enabling data sharing without duplication.

Seamless Integration with Business Intelligence Tools

Snowflake’s compatibility with standard SQL makes it an ideal partner for enterprise BI tools like Microsoft Fabric with Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, and Informatica. This seamless integration means that experienced analytics users can quickly adapt to Snowflake without extensive retraining. Popular data integration tools like Informatica and Azure Data Factory further enhance Snowflake’s capabilities, enabling smooth data ingestion and transformation processes.

Smartbridge clients are successfully using Snowflake as a replacement for proprietary analytics platforms like Netezza (especially now that IBM has ended support) or to modernize their on-premises data warehouse. Further use cases include data exploration and product development.

Business decision-makers have access to vast amounts of information that aren’t necessarily in a form conducive to deep analysis. Companies want to quickly set up an environment to interrogate their data so they can determine whether it has enough value to justify a more robust initiative. A concern many have is that they’ll spend too much time on data preparation activities which would offset productivity.

Some organizations have gone to great lengths to build out the infrastructure, so they can test their business intelligence capabilities. Snowflake allows simple provisioning, elastic scalability, and integration with familiar tools. This shortens the setup time and reduces the effort to take a project from concept to design to delivery.

Agility is a shift away from the status quo. To remain competitive, people acquire and analyze data in the same dynamic manner as they make decisions. Businesses need to be agile to uncover and understand new market opportunities. Working outside the constraints of the data warehouse environment does require analysts to develop skills and processes to ensure their conclusions are based on solid design principles and best practices. Smartbridge can help with planning and technical guidance.

Keep Reading: Modern Cloud Data Warehousing with Snowflake