Snowflake: Data Lake Solutions

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Jan 9th, 2025

Snowflake gives you a cloud-based platform to work with your data. The data warehousing platform works well with data lakes, supporting data in structured and semi-structured formats.

With Snowflake, you can analyze data found in JSON, Avro, and Parquet files. To learn more about data lakes and Snowflake, read our article below. We start with covering the basics, like “What is a data lake?”.

What is a Data Lake?

A data lake lets you store all your data (structured and unstructured) in a central location. It differs from a database, as those traditional ones have set structures and require you to organize your data in particular formats.

Data lake services, on the other hand, can store multiple types of data in their original format. Data can even belong to different sources like social media information, logs, and sensors.

Two big features of a data lake solution are its powers to scale and be flexible.

Data lakes are known to support massive volumes of data for your automation and analysis tools. And you don’t need to worry about running out of space for your data since you can simply add more storage if you need.

So, why are data lakes flexible? Well, they can store your raw data. This means you can save various data types in structured, semi-structured, and unstructured formats.

Data Lake Storage

With a data lake storage provider, you can store large volumes of raw data and access it when needed. A data lake storage system is a massive consideration for projects with colossal data architecture since it is flexible, scalable, and affordable for many companies.

When looking for data lake storage systems, make sure that the one you choose has the following features:

Look for an affordable service. Many providers, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, offer data lake storage with pre-paid subscription models.

Ensure that your data lake storage system can save your data in a raw format. This feature will help protect your data’s initial form if you need to access the original copy. More than that, though, this feature lets you analyze your data flexibly by using many data processing techniques.

Data Lake Tools

Snowflake is a powerful platform to analyze data, but it’s not a data lake platform. 

However, it does provide you with integration options, and it can support tools intended to work with data lakes. 

If you decide to work with Snowflake, integrate tools to help you with tasks in your data lake. We explore two below:

You could start with Snowflake’s Data Sharing tool. It can share data with live and read-only access across various Snowflake accounts. An added bonus, is that if you need your teams to collaborate on data in Snowflake, this tool will help you get the job done.

Is your data stored in an external cloud storage system such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Data Lake Storage? You can still integrate your cloud storage platform with Snowflake. Snowflake works well with external tables and data lakes.

We hope to see you soon! 

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Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.