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Snowflake: What use-cases are driving adoption?

Supreeth Rao

We have been using Snowflake for many months now within Theom. Theom has a lot of technologists who have worked in distributed computing for a long time. With such a background, it’s been a  fascinating experience to use a modern cloud data warehouse. The convenience, performance, and elasticity stand out. 

“What is driving this large-scale adoption?” was an interesting question for us. This article summarizes our findings of interviewing 50+ customers across health care & life sciences, finance, advertising, e-commerce, and many more. There are many features and reasons. However, a few stand out, and there is a pattern. Here are the top four that we derived from this research.

  1. Snowflake presents a single source of truth for data for developers, analysts, researchers within an enterprise—all of the data is in one warehouse for building suitable algorithms and insights. 
  2. Fully managed cloud data warehouse—brings in ease of operations, elasticity, and on demand-scale up or down.
  3. Zero-copy cloning—many enterprises now have the ability with Snowflake to create zero-copy clones, copy of the entire table or schema without copying underlying data (cost savings!). Imagine production data in no time available for development or research purposes. Back in the day, while using Hadoop (HDFS), this meant a distributed copy job!!!
  4. Ease of sharing—Snowflake simplifies sharing and consuming data from a 3rd party. At the foundation of it all, the platform enables sharing without copying or moving data, making it a quick and easy experience. 


Snowflake adoption and use of these features have interesting security implications. If you use Snowflake and want to discuss these features or security implications, talk to us. Send an email or LinkedIn or Twitter. We will be happy to follow up.