Since years, companies have been making best use of different systems for managing their analytical and transactional workloads. Both have been equally important with diverse infrastructural and technical needs. A need has been identified to leverage a unified structure that can encompass the niceties of both. And here it comes – the Snowflake Unistore, also technically known as ‘Hybrid Table’.

Powered by Snowflake, Unistore focusses on combining Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) with Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) as the latest workload that unifies datasets for application deployment and development in almost real-time environment. This innovative technology is opening newer avenues for business advancements and digital transformation.

Before we understand the basics of Unistore, let us have a look at why the need for a unified workload arose.

Key Challenges Faced While Using Two Separate Systems

As we compare the two popular data processing systems, OLTP is known for capturing transactional data and process transactions through queries at real-time. OLAP is known for analysing complicated queries around huge volumes of business data. Since both have their own significance, businesses kept using both systems, leading to multiple hurdles they faced while processing the workloads.

Here are some of the challenges that led to the emergence of Unistore:

• Since transactional information is stored as rows and analytical information as columns, special pipelines needed to be developed and deployed for data transmission between systems
• Teams faced delay in development time while managing data between the two systems
• Businesses had to retain redundant datasets across different setups
• Having secure and consistent data across data storages became difficult to achieve
• There were increasing issues related to latency and costs

Snowflake Unistore – An Introduction

“Hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) is a data architecture that joins online transactional processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads, allowing one system to support both processing sets.”

Unistore by Snowflake is the modern-day workload to achieve effective HTAP through a cloud-driven infrastructure. It lessens the occurrence of databases through a streamlined architecture that can seamlessly operate between the analytical data and transactional data. Completely secure and unified, it offers a consistent performance across all types of mediums and infrastructure.

It not only just assists in data unification, but it also helps in creating applications in Snowflake by executing queries in real-time under a completely governed umbrella. As its technical counterpart and Snowflake component, the hybrid table changes its behaviour as per the need of the processing, be it a row-based transactional processing or a column-base analytical query.

Salient Advantages of Unistore

No wonder Snowflake Unistore has been garnering increased attention, it is all attributed to the below mentioned benefits that it portrays:

• Unified dataset that offers effective, enhanced and futuristic business avenues to grow
• Creation of complex transactional systems on Snowflake for the enterprise
• Enhanced client experience with better analytical and transactional insights
• Minimal need for creating ETL-based pipelines for moving the data around
• Lessened operational complication and budgeted costs because of a single way of working
• Easy maintenance of architecture through well-defined security protocols
• Availing near real-time information for processing instead of having to wait for information for long
• Faster application development directly on Snowflake
• Simplification of organizational security and compliance requirements

An Interesting Read: Snowflake Arctic: A Deep Dive into the Cost-Effective Enterprise LLM

How Does Unistore Work?

Snowflake Unistore operates through Hybrid tables – a Snowflake object that lets users store data for transactional processing and analytical processing, with the same set of architecture and platform. It empowers users to have quick operations with the help of indexes and Snowflake enforcing primary keys. Since the keys and constraints are imposed on hybrid tables and not on Snowflake tables, the processing is much faster and effective.

The hybrid table operates as needed – if there is any transaction processing, it uses the row format, if there is any analytical processing, it uses the column format. The user, on the front, doesn’t need to bother about how and what to do, since the workload operates accordingly. It is optimized for providing support to both kinds of processing, as needed with its hybrid storage capacity.

The need for hybrid tables is most significant when there are business systems that need transactional as well as analytical processing, in parallel. This processing could be about reading a large amount of data or writing it or even fetching multiple records for any requirement. Whatever it may be, Unistore works as a unified workload to manage these processing requirements.

The main advantage of using hybrid tables is that they are easy to learn and can work with all kinds of data, at a single place. It ensures proper governance and security measures, lessening the costs that would have otherwise been heavy. Clubbed with the goodness of Snowflake, Unistore leverages the benefits that hybrid tables bring along and that is how this workload works.

On a Wrapping Note

Just the way Snowflake Unistore has been showing a promising way ahead, being the apt way to deal with OLTP and OLAP in parallel, its popularity and demand are increasing. Developers are finding it convenient to create light weighted transactional use cases with effectiveness and proper integrity rules. Imagine the users don’t have to move or copy the data, while processing either for analysis or transactions. All at one place, would they need anything more!

Ridgeant offers a widespread suite of Snowflake services to transform the way you manage, analyse, and derive insights from your data. We have a well-experienced team of certified Snowflake developers who have implemented multiple and challenging Snowflake applications across the globe.

You can hire our Snowflake developers to experience a professional, creative and rewarding output leveraging the goodness of Snowflake Unistore in the data-driven enterprise. It would be a perfect mix of the brain of our Snowflake taskforce with the beauty of the Snowflake Unistore technology! What more!