{"id":15662,"date":"2021-09-23T13:15:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-23T20:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devwww.3cloudsolutions.com\/post\/synapse-vs-snowflake-the-data-warehouse-debate-3\/"},"modified":"2024-02-28T07:25:12","modified_gmt":"2024-02-28T15:25:12","slug":"synapse-vs-snowflake-the-data-warehouse-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/resources\/synapse-vs-snowflake-the-data-warehouse-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"Azure Synapse vs Snowflake: The Data Warehouse Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Data warehousing<\/a> in the cloud has become a hot topic for most organizations as data volume grows exponentially, and yet the capacity to manually manage it all but diminishes. The ecosystem is replete with options, each with a host of features and integrations. In this article, we will discuss two of the most common (and commonly discussed!) data warehousing services, Azure Synapse and Snowflake Data Warehouse (DW). For this article, we will focus on areas of similarity as well as differentiators, and provide some context for evaluation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Azure<\/span><\/p>\n

Snowflake DW: A Brief Overview<\/h2>\n

Snowflake<\/a><\/span>, as a company, was founded in July of 2012 and built their organization around the success of their data warehousing solution. This service, along with their ongoing support for it, is their sole focus. As a result, the polish given to this product creates a high shine, and the team is proud to promote their ‘free-think’ approach to the domain.<\/span><\/p>\n

This data warehouse is a multi-cloud software as a service (SaaS) solution, and is built on the back of the major cloud provider’s storage options. This means a Snowflake DW is backed by an Azure Storage Account, an AWS S3 account, or a GCP Cloud Storage instance. It is worth noting that Snowflake’s model means that the DW is technically on their<\/em> (Snowflake’s) cloud instance in whichever public cloud it is deployed, and not the customer’s. This is at least somewhat due to their approach to compute: Snowflake maintains a collection of pre-provisioned (and pre-warmed) virtual machine (VM) instances, for the sake of compute. Snowflake also features their own ANSI-compliant (to an extent) SQL dialect, called SnowSQL.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The primary difference between Snowflake and most other DW offerings is the fully decoupled compute and storage.<\/span><\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

This means, from the perspective of your data warehouse, compute and storage are merely services to be called in to. Storage is the external account set during provisioning, and compute is procured at query-time from the existing VM pool. This compute capacity is allocated in so-called \u201ct-shirt sizes\u201d (small, medium, large, etc.) with each step up the size chart representing a doubling of the number of VM’s concurrently processing the data. When a query is submitted, it is compiled and distributed to the compute nodes, data is procured, and processing is completed, collated, and returned.<\/span>\"Snowflake\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Synapse: Revolutionary Integration
\n<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n

Synapse<\/a><\/span>, by contrast, is a very new (circa Dec. 2020) data platform offering from Microsoft, built to fulfill a somewhat different role in the big data ecosystem. While it has long-standing roots in Microsoft’s award winning Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) database work that spans both on-premises appliances and the cloud (PDW -> APS -> Azure SQL DW), it has rebranded since adding an otherwise unmatched collection of services into a single platform.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Synapse offers an end-to-end integrated data experience<\/em>,
\nwhich allows querying of data without a dedicated pool<\/a>.<\/span><\/h4>\n


\nSynapse offers integration to Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipelines, SQL DW Dedicated Pools, Synapse Serverless, and even Spark Pools, as well as compatibility with many other compute and storage services by virtue of the Azure Data Factory integration.<\/span><\/p>\n

Synapse is regarded as a PaaS (platform-as-a-service) solution and effectively represents an integration of numerous existing Microsoft data solutions. This integration is natively presented in the Synapse Studio experience, which is the front-end of Synapse. It allows for development, monitoring, and more. <\/span><\/p>\n

Synapse Studio includes direct development experiences for the following services\/platforms: <\/span><\/p>\n