Traditional architectures

To appreciate the innovation of the Snowflake Data Cloud, we have to take a step back and recall the designs and related limitations associated with its predecessors. Long before the advent of the cloud, databases started as physical on-premises appliances and, since their inception, have all faced the same challenge: scalability.

In the past, databases were confined to a physical server on which they relied for storage and processing power. As usage increased, memory would fill up, and CPU demand would reach the available limit, forcing the user to add more resources to the server or buy a new one altogether. As either response involved maintenance and downtime, hardware purchases had to be forward-looking, anticipating database growth several years into the future.

The following figure outlines the structure and key pieces of a traditional database. Although processing power, memory, and disk space were all customizable to a degree, they came packaged...