Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Our company has grown organically and by acquisition, and as a result we have a series of disparate software products with around 800 databases across different clouds and different databases - SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, AWS, Azure, etc.
My challenge was to implement an awesome and consistent reporting suite that allowed customers full access to all of their data across all of our products. While the software development team is working on integrating all these disparate products, that's a significant multi-year challenge.
Implementing a data lake in Snowflake greatly empowered my team to make tremendous reporting, blending data from many sources, without adding any load to the transactional databases. What's more, Snowflake has a vast array of excellent built-in features such as row-level security, data masking, secure sharing, and other items that allowed us to push security right down to the database level so we secure data no matter how customers access it, without relying on complex where clauses, etc., in queries.
The Snowflake model of separating compute from storage and allowing us to have differing workloads for differing usage scenarios is also very helpful.
Alternatives Considered
Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Databricks Lakehouse Platform (Unified Analytics Platform)
Other Software Used
Hevo Data, Logi Composer (Zoomdata), Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform), Amazon Redshift, Microsoft SQL Server