intelligent

The team then migrated the entire eight terabyte data warehouse to Snowflake in just one day . Overall , its monthly costs have been reduced by 40 % but , just as importantly , it has allowed Deputy to regain control over its data . The fact that its storage and compute resources have now been separated means it can tailor its resources to match demands . Snowflake also enables the analytics team to perform data transformation tasks within the warehouse , reducing complexity and processing time .

Resource monitoring ensures the company doesn ’ t exceed its allocated resources during busy periods . Managers can readily view and reallocate resources if required . Logging features allow change tracking while query profiling ensures optimal query design and shows users the best way to extract value from the data warehouse .

A significant and unexpected benefit of migrating to Snowflake has been a culture shift where everyone , not just the analytics team , is analysing and using data .

Work is now underway to deliver a self-service capability . This means everyone can access data rather than having to submit a request and wait .

Thomas Ward , Director , Data , Insights and Analytics at Deputy , told Intelligent SME . tech more about why the company chose Snowflake .

What were the main benefits which attracted the company to Snowflake ?

Cost was one , and predictability of costs sitting alongside that , driven by Snowflake ’ s separation of storage and compute . We can pay for only the performance we need , independent of the storage that we require . I think confidence in the support model played a role , as well as confidence in the technology itself and the product roadmap . The direction that it is going with the product , in general , aligns with our interests .

How easy was the implementation ?

The implementation of Snowflake itself is a separate question from how easy the migration was . I think doing a migration of a data warehouse is never really going to be easy . That ’ s unavoidable regardless of what platform you ’ re moving to . The part of it that was Snowflake-specific was pretty straightforward . Again , the support was very good – it was in-house support , rather than being outsourced to a third party .

Why have the monthly costs been reduced ?

We achieved a cost reduction on the order of about 60 % below our previous solution , almost immediately upon completing the migration to Snowflake . And we ’ ve achieved further reduction since then through introducing various efficiency improvements to the data warehouse and our pipelines . Initially , the cost reductions came from two sources , which were the separate storage and compute . In our previous data warehouse , we were paying significantly more than we really needed , just because there was no flexibility in terms of the billing there .

And the second major thing was the ability within Snowflake to assign different compute resources to specific user roles and tasks . This also was a factor in why our previous solution was relatively inefficient from a cost standpoint . We had to size the warehouse based on the requirements of the most demanding users , and therefore over-resource for low priority use cases , because we couldn ’ t provision them differently .

Why do you think migrating to Snowflake has been a culture shift for everyone , not just the analytics team ?

Probably the biggest thing that has caused a culture shift based on Snowflake is the

Previous page : Thomas Ward , Director , Data , Insights and Analytics at Deputy

A SIGNIFICANT AND UNEXPECTED BENEFIT OF MIGRATING TO SNOWFLAKE HAS BEEN A CULTURE SHIFT WHERE EVERYONE , NOT JUST THE ANALYTICS TEAM , IS ANALYSING AND USING DATA .