Snowflake vs. Data Lakes: Differences, Use Cases, Examples

Ansam Yousry
ILLUMINATION
Published in
10 min readApr 6, 2023

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Snowflake vs. Data Lakes (Created by Canva), the author assumes responsibility for the provenance and copyright.

In today’s data-driven world, managing and analyzing large amounts of data is crucial for businesses to stay competitive. Two popular data architecture solutions for handling large amounts of data are Snowflake and data lakes. However, choosing between these two solutions can be challenging. In this article, we’ll compare and contrast Snowflake and data lakes, so you can make an informed decision on which solution is best for your business.

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that’s designed to handle large amounts of structured data. With its columnar storage model, Snowflake is optimized for efficient data storage and querying. It allows users to store, process, and analyze data using SQL and supports a variety of data integration and transformation tools. If your business primarily deals with structured data, such as financial or customer data, Snowflake may be the right solution for you.

What are Data Lakes?

Data lakes, on the other hand, are centralized repositories that can store a wide range of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in their raw format. A data lake is usually built on a distributed file system, such as Hadoop, and can be accessed and analyzed using various tools and…

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Ansam Yousry
ILLUMINATION

Help data engineers grow their skills by sharing real-world demos and in-depth technical articles. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ansam-yousry/