The Snowflake Data Cloud offers unparalleled flexibility, performance, and ease of use; however, migrating to a new data platform is not without its challenges. Ensuring a seamless transition requires a strategic approach, and this is where the expertise of a Snowflake consultant becomes invaluable.
From saving precious time to maximizing your budget, we’ll uncover why hiring a Snowflake consultant to help migrate your company to Snowflake is the key to unlocking Snowflake’s full potential.
What is Snowflake?
Snowflake is a cloud-native data warehousing platform that separates computing and storage, allowing for automatic scaling and pay-per-use pricing. Unlike traditional data warehousing solutions, Snowflake brings critical features like Secure Data Sharing, Snowpipe, Streams, and Time-Travel to the enterprise data architecture space.
To take advantage of these powerful features, hundreds of companies are migrating to Snowflake each year.
Why Hire a Snowflake Consultant for Your Migration?
Data migrations are not a one-size-fits-all process. If done poorly, the amount of time, resources, and money spent can accumulate at blistering speeds while severely damaging confidence for future data endeavors. To avoid this headache, many businesses rely on experienced Snowflake consultants to ensure a smooth transition.
Below are a few of the most important reasons businesses hire Snowflake migration consultants.Â
Expertise and Experience
Snowflake consultants come with the knowledge and experience of dozens (if not hundreds) of successful migrations to Snowflake. They can use this information to conduct a comprehensive assessment of your situation and create a strategic plan for optimizing architecture, ensuring data integrity, and mitigating risks.Â
Their insights can also cover cost optimization strategies, help train your internal teams, and foster a seamless integration with your existing systems. After the migration, consultants can implement monitoring systems (such as phData’s Advisor Tool) and ensure that the Snowflake environment continues to align with your business needs and operates at peak efficiency.Â
Customized Solutions
Snowflake consultants will come ready to create a customized solution tailored to your business needs and requirements. They will assess every aspect of your current data architecture, discover your business objectives, and make a plan for migration specifically designed for you.Â
By focusing on these distinct needs, the migration process will be painless and ensure that it will be aligned with the technical aspects of Snowflake and the nuances of your data environment. A personalized approach such as this will guarantee an efficient migration, integrating smoothly with your existing processes without disrupting your normal day-to-day business processes.Â
Learn how phData helped a global manufacturing company migrate to Snowflake in 30 weeks with no interruptions to the business.
Performance Optimization
With many migrations to Snowflake under their belt, consultants draw on their expertise to implement best practices for schema design and query optimization to ensure seamless operations of your Snowflake platform.Â
They can fine-tune your Snowflake environment, making it more responsive, efficient, and effective. They will focus on organizing data for quicker queries, optimizing virtual data warehouses, and refining query processes. The result is a data warehouse offering faster query responses, improved performance, and cost efficiency throughout your Snowflake account.
Training and Knowledge Transfer
Consultants provide essential training for your internal teams during the migration process. This knowledge transfer is designed to make your team proficient in managing and optimizing the Snowflake environment once the consultant’s involvement concludes.Â
By imparting key skills and insights, consultants ensure that your internal teams are well-prepared to independently handle and maximize the performance of the data environment, promoting long-term self-sufficiency within your organization.
Cost Optimization
Consultants assist in understanding Snowflake’s pricing model and configure the platform to align with your budget while ensuring performance requirements are met. This provides a balanced approach that not only controls expenses but also maximizes the value of your investment in the Snowflake platform.Â
Through strategic configuration, consultants contribute to the financial efficiency of your data operations, making sure your organization gets the most out of Snowflake while staying within budget constraints.
Faster Time to Value
Snowflake consultants efficiently guide your organization from the planning phase to a fully functional Snowflake environment. Leveraging their knowledge, consultants streamline the implementation process, ensuring a quicker transition. This accelerated timeline allows your organization to swiftly benefit from the advanced capabilities of Snowflake, enhancing data-driven insights and decision-making.
Snowflake Ecosystem Knowledge
Snowflake partners with a wide range of tools and technologies, such as business intelligence, data governance, and transformation tools. No matter which partner you choose, Snowflake consultants have probably used the technology with a previous client and will carry that experience and expertise while working with your business.
Why Choose phData as your Snowflake consultant?
Now that you’re convinced you should partner with a Snowflake consultant for your migration, you’re probably wondering, who do I choose? Here are some reasons we think will compel you to use phData:
Knowledge
Here at phData, we strive to be the most well-versed data engineers for Snowflake. To prove this knowledge, our employees have achieved over 300 Snowflake certifications. Furthermore, we spread our knowledge throughout the internet, creating hundreds of blogs each year, just like this one, to help anyone working with Snowflake and other data engineering-related topics.
Snowflake Partner of the Year
As a Snowflake Elite Consulting Partner and the 2023 Partner of the Year, phData is unmatched in our expertise of the Snowflake platform. Not only have we performed hundreds of migrations to Snowflake, customers come to us for their automation, machine learning, and analytics needs as well.Â
Our engagements are always solution-centric and consultative, leaving customers more knowledgeable and ensuring their Snowflake account is set up for success in the future.
Snowflake Ecosystem Partners of the Year
Not only are the phData team experts in Snowflake, but we have also been acknowledged as experts by many of the partners in the Snowflake Ecosystem. Here are a few of the partner of the year awards we’ve earned:
phData Toolkit
With this breadth of experience and knowledge, we have created tools to help our customers accelerate their migrations to Snowflake while being cost-efficient and performant. We call this set of tools the phData Toolkit, and it is free! There are many tools in the Toolkit, but here are some of the highlights that help the most with migrations:
SQL Translation
Automated translation is indispensable when migrating between data platforms. The SQL Translation application instantly converts queries from one SQL dialect to another. Essentially, it functions like Google Translate but only for SQL dialects.Â
SQL Translation helps save time and minimize errors whenever you need to translate SQL from one dialect to another. It is also a helpful tool for learning a new SQL dialect. Users can write queries they are familiar with and use the translation result to learn the equivalent syntax.
Advisor Tool
With the Advisor Tool, you can quickly and easily identify opportunities to improve the configuration, security, performance, and efficiency of your Snowflake environment. We have worked closely with our Snowflake data and operations experts to ensure our Advisor Tool delivers actionable recommendations based on best practices and phData’s vast real-world experience on the Snowflake Platform.
Provision Tool
A major bottleneck to getting value from a Snowflake Data Cloud environment is creating the databases, schemas, roles, and access grants that make up a data system information architecture. Creating, applying, and evolving this information architecture can be a time-consuming and error-prone process.Â
Our template-driven Provision Tool automates onboarding users and projects to Snowflake, allowing your data teams to start producing real value immediately.
Datasource Tool
The Data Source (DS) Tool enables users to collect, compare, analyze, and act on data source metadata and profile metrics. It’s a lightweight Command Line Interface (CLI) that takes a low code approach to profiling data sources to allow anyone to access the tool’s power.Â
The DS Tool can collect metadata and data quality metrics and compare them between data sources for almost any platform, but the most commonly supported platforms include:
Snowflake
Hive/Impala
Oracle
SQL Server
Closing
In this blog, we have shown why hiring a Snowflake consultant can help make your migration go smoothly, swiftly, and cost-effectively. Everyone wants a smooth transition to something new, especially with as big a move as your data platform.Â
If your organization is pursuing a move to Snowflake, we recommend attending one of our free Snowflake Migration Assessment Workshops as a next step.
These workshops are a fantastic opportunity to get all your migration questions answered by an expert in a casual setting. You can expect straightforward answers, honest advice, and guidance.
