Road to Snowflake SnowPro Core Certification: Snowflake Architecture
Second Chapter: Snowflake Architecture
5 min readAug 30, 2021
This chapter will study in detail the architecture that Snowflake uses to provide this amazing service, apart from typical exam questions to prepare you for the Snowflake SnowPro Core Certification Exam. These are the key concepts that we are going to study:
- Shared-Disk & Shared-Nothing
- Snowflake Layers
- Snowflake Objects
- Typical Exam Questions about Snowflake Architecture
Remember that all the chapters from the course can be found in the following link.
SHARED-DISK & SHARED-NOTHING
Snowflake's architecture is a hybrid of traditional shared-disk and shared-nothing database architectures. This is of utmost importance; IT ALWAYS APPEARS IN THE EXAM.
- Similar to shared-disk architectures → Snowflake uses a central data repository for persisted data accessible from all compute nodes in the platform.
- Similar to shared-nothing architectures → Snowflake processes queries using virtual warehouses where each node in the cluster stores a portion of the entire data set locally.