In nearly every industry, data has become an indispensable resource. Organizations that are very successful usually manage their data efficiently. That’s where the data warehouse plays a key role.
Snowflake data warehouse offers immense benefits over on-premises systems. Snowflake implementation gives companies an edge as it increases agility, security, reliability and flexibility to manage and leverage data like never before.
Before discussing how you will make a transition from the on-premises data warehouse to Snowflake, let’s look at what data types you can migrate to Snowflake and how to prepare your data for Snowflake migration.
Let’s look at what data types you can migrate to Snowflake You can migrate all data types, including structured, semi-structured and even unstructured data.
You can store your structured data at any size in Snowflake, according to your needs. Snowflake supports any valid, single-byte delimiters, including CSV and TSV formats. Snowflake also supports certain semi-structured data types, including JSON, Avro, ORC, XML, Parquet, etc. For unstructured data, you need to use Snowflake’s Snowpark. Snowpark enables the storage, processing and querying of unstructured data, such as medical images or call center recordings.
Here’s a three-step process to migrate data from the on-premises data warehouse to Snowflake. The following steps use a CSV example to illustrate the steps involved in simple data migration.
Select and split your data
Use a file splitter like GSplit or an ETL tool to split the large file into smaller chunks. Doing so allows you to take advantage of Snowflake’s parallel processing capabilities.
Migrate data to a Snowflake staging area
Use the SnowSQL command line client to stage the data. Then, a PUT command with the correct Snowflake syntax will begin staging your local files.
Verify your migration to the cloud
Once the process is complete, you’ll have successfully transferred your local CSV files to Snowflake’s internal stages. Using the command ls, you can list all the files in your directory.
Snowflake cloud services offer businesses many features and improvements over traditional on-premises solutions. Plus, migrating from on-premises to the cloud isn’t as daunting as you may have thought – especially with the right custom software developer.