Snowflake and ClicData integration may raise eyebrows, but its benefits are substantial.
This synergy has proven invaluable for many users who optimize data storage with Snowflake and enhance their visualization with ClicData, yielding high-performance analytics tailored to specific industry needs.
In this article, we show you how Snowflake and ClicData combined offer a potent blend of scalability, efficiency, and flexibility in data management and analytics, enabling your organization to drive superior insights and decision-making capabilities.
But first, what’s Snowflake?
Snowflake is a data warehouse built on top of the Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure.
There’s no hardware or software to select, install, configure, or manage, so it’s ideal for organizations that don’t want to dedicate resources for setup, maintenance, and support of in-house servers.
You might wonder why you need Snowflake and why you wouldn’t just go directly to, say, Amazon AWS and purchase Redshift, DynamoDB, or MySQL?
One reason is that, with Snowflake, you can create a uniform layer between you and the database infrastructure provider (the three big ones, at least).
Secondly, Snowflake throws in additional functionality to ensure that storage and queries scale in volume and in performance as needed. You don’t have to master the individual implementations and cloud provider settings and configurations.
They provide these extra services and more via their Cloud Services in three regions—North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific.
Now, what’s ClicData?
It’s a cloud-based data management and analytics platform that allows you to connect, store, transform, visualize, and share data from any source.
Yes, we can hear you wonder: « Why would you build an integration to Snowflake if you also provide a built-in data warehouse and ETL functions? » – Well, let’s explore two use cases and answer that!
Why Should You Combine Snowflake and ClicData?
While it may seem that Snowflake and ClicData are competing technologies for the data warehousing and processing steps of the analytics process, the integration has proven valuable for many customers.
Using Snowflake For ETL and ClicData for Data Viz
At ClicData, we aimed to offer a connection to Snowflake, recognizing its immediate value for customers who’ve already established their data warehouse there.
But these customers need to provide analytics and visualization to external users seamlessly, without disrupting their Snowflake architecture or incurring high costs for additional modules and tools.
With high volumes of data stored in Snowflake, ClicData can be used to use Snowflake’s querying power to bring extracts of data ready for consumption within ClicData—periodically, on-demand, or in real-time.
This was the case of Shawn Tracy, Head of Customer Analytics at Willow Point Consulting, who needed to move and process terabytes of data for their health and wellbeing industry clients:
« We move terabytes of data daily for our clients across the globe. We use Snowflake for data storage and ETL, taking advantage of its power and scalability to optimize processing. Once processing has completed in Snowflake, we only push the data that’s necessary for reporting into ClicData. »
Shawn Tracy, Head of Customer Analytics at Willow Point Consulting
When asked if this was a tedious process, he added:
« Their Snowflake native connector makes this step so easy and while Snowflake does have some visualization tools, they are rudimentary in comparison to what ClicData offers in terms of visualization. »
Shawn Tracy, Head of Customer Analytics at Willow Point Consulting
ClicData goes beyond Snowflake reporting capabilities so you can build visualizations that answer key business questions. Here’s what Shawn was able to do for his clients:
« I’ve used ClicData for 6 years across 4 companies and absolutely love the flexibility of their data visualizations. We are able to customize dashboard layouts to match high fidelity designs, through a combination of the standard visualization features and CSS. We then embed the dashboards in our custom applications for a seamless user experience. The combination of the processing power of Snowflake with the highly customizable nature of ClicData is a winning combination for me and my clients. »
Shawn Tracy, Head of Customer Analytics at Willow Point Consulting
Using ClicData for Data Extraction and Snowflake For Data Warehousing
Snowflake does not offer connectors to external data sources, databases, or systems. That type of work is typically done via Snowflake’s API integration or through highly customized development work.
But now, Snowflake customers can utilize ClicData to connect to the hundreds of systems it connects to and feed that data via our API, data stream, or SQL direct connection to Snowflake.
Besides, one might want to add complementary data – coming from other systems.
ClicData makes this aggregation easier with +300 native connectors. The best part? Your data is already pre-formatted and ready to be used for your analytics and visualization needs!
ClicData can also be used to share analytics and visualizations to internal and external users.
ClicData + Snowflake, your new data processing and analytics powerhouse
What matters the most is picking the best scenario for your needs, and how easily you can use data to your advantage.
If you do require large-scale data power and scalability and have built your data warehouse in Snowflake, you can use ClicData as a data ingestion tool or as a data visualization tool.
Either or both options will drive results faster and potentially even lower costs in your overall data and Business Intelligence strategy.