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Snowflake Reinvents the Data Warehouse for the Cloud
[October 21, 2014]

Snowflake Reinvents the Data Warehouse for the Cloud


(Marketwire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) SAN MATEO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 10/21/14 -- Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, today announced the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouseâ„¢, the first data warehouse built from the ground up for the cloud. Based on a patent-pending new architecture, Snowflake's cloud service delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud -- at a 90 percent lower cost than on-premises data warehouses.



While data and the way it is used have changed dramatically, traditional data warehouses remain too complex, inflexible and expensive. At the same time, newer "big data" platforms still require the specialized expertise of operations and data science experts. Because none of these solutions were designed for the cloud, they are unable to leverage the full power of cloud computing.

Introducing the Snowflake Elastic Data WarehouseSnowflake was founded by a team of veteran experts in database technology who saw the need and the opportunity to reinvent data warehousing. They shared a vision to make it possible to bring together all users, all data and all workloads in a single data warehouse, without compromising performance, flexibility or ease of use.


The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is an all-new data warehouse built from the ground up for the cloud. Its patent-pending architecture decouples data storage from compute, making it uniquely able to take advantage of the elasticity, scalability and flexibility of the cloud. As a native relational database with full support for standard SQL, Snowflake empowers any analyst with self-service access to data, which enables organizations to take advantage of the tools and skills that they already have.

"Data warehousing is a market ripe for innovation," said Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake. "Today's solutions are based on architectures that date back almost 30 years. While data analytics can transform organizations, the infrastructure requirements are prohibitive. The cloud enables a different approach, but that requires the vision and the technical ability to start from scratch. From day one, Snowflake focused on creating a software service that brings together both transactional and machine-generated data for deeper insight and business understanding. Snowflake has reinvented the data warehouse for everyone." The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse uniquely delivers: Data warehousing as a service. Snowflake eliminates the pains associated with managing and tuning a database. That enables self-service access to data so that analysts can focus on getting value from data rather than on managing hardware and software. Multidimensional elasticity. Unlike existing products, Snowflake's elastic scaling technology makes it possible to independently scale users, data and workloads, delivering optimal performance at any scale. Elastic scaling makes it possible to simultaneously load and query data because every user and workload can have exactly the resources needed, without contention. Single service for all business data. Snowflake brings native storage of semi-structured data into a relational database that understands and fully optimizes querying of that data. Analysts can query structured and semi-structured data in a single system without compromise.

The Snowflake team brings decades of experience from companies including Actian, Cloudera, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Teradata, and holds over 120 patents. In a separate announcement today, Snowflake also disclosed $26 million in funding from leading venture capital firms including Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures.

AvailabilityThe Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is currently available in beta for qualified organizations. For more information contact Snowflake at [email protected].

Resources Website: www.snowflake.net Twitter: www.twitter.com/SnowflakeDB LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/snowflake-computing YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/snowflakecomputing Google+: http://goo.gl/WQbQp2 Snowflake is hiring: http://www.snowflake.net/about/careers/ Supporting Quotes"A common theme we've seen in our surveys and research is that business demands are forcing people to rethink their data platforms. Relational data warehouses have a critical role to play, but conventional approaches can be too expensive, too complex and too inflexible to handle today's data challenges," said John L. Myers, managing research director for BI/DW at EMA, a Boulder-based industry analysis firm. "Snowflake is delivering a new data warehouse that addresses these issues with a unique approach for the cloud. By providing the flexibility to handle different types of data and quickly make data accessible to analysts, Snowflake is delivering unique customer value through new innovation." "The traditional data warehouse environment is a permanent and perpetual cost. Snowflake is introducing the pay-for-what-you-use model for our business," said Justin Glatz, executive director of information services at Condé Nast. "With Snowflake, we have a cloud foundation for our data warehouses that is going to enable us to ask more iterative questions of our data." "We evaluated several data warehousing offerings for Adobe AudienceManager and were immediately struck by the innovative cloud-based architecture Snowflake has created," said David Weinstein, Director of Software Development for Media & Advertising Solutions at Adobe. "The flexibility that comes from separating compute from storage provides users and applications with on-demand access to business-critical data at the performance level and scale required. Our testing indicated that Snowflake's cost / performance ratio could exceed alternate cloud-based solutions in the market." "Whoever has the biggest dataset can answer the hardest questions. Partnering with Snowflake is what's enabling us to do that," said James Rooney, senior vice president of media platforms at Accordant Media. "Instead of spending an hour waiting for a response, we get it in five minutes with Snowflake. So we can spend more time interpreting the result or white-boarding harder questions." "Snowflake enables us to unlock large datasets to make it possible for business analysts, developers and account managers to ask their own questions directly of the data," said Tamer Hassan, co-founder and CTO of White Ops. "Pulling insights out of a large volume of data is something that Snowflake has enabled us to do rapidly." "Snowflake gives us everything we wanted in an analytic database but could never find: zero administration, extremely fast loading of JSON data directly from Amazon's S3 cloud storage, truly elastic scale-up and scale-down of storage AND compute resources with no downtime, and -- very importantly -- a true SQL interface with real analytic functions," said Jeff Shukis, VP of engineering and technology operations at VoiceBase. "Snowflake is the first analytic database that really leverages the power of the cloud." About Snowflake Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, was founded in 2012 by a team of experts who hold over 120 patents in the fields of database architecture, data warehouses, query optimization and parallelization. Snowflake was created with the vision to reinvent the data warehouse, bringing together all users, all data and all workloads in a single repository. The company is backed by leading investors including Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Snowflake is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be found online at www.snowflake.net.

Media Contact Danielle Salvato-Earl Kulesa Faul for Snowflake Computing (650) 922-7287 Email Contact Source: Snowflake Computing

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