page124
107
How to implement
STORAGE INTEGRATION
and
STAGE
is not discussed further in this
chapter; I cover this topic in depth within Building the Snowflake Data Cloud. I discuss
S3-compatible storage later in this chapter as this subject has not been addressed
elsewhere.
Storage Costs
Using storage incurs cost; you pay for everything you consume. Snowflake does not
make a margin on storage charges but instead passes through storage charges from
the cloud provider according to the region and cloud provider. Nominally for AWS,
and depending upon the region, it’s approximately $23/terabyte. Note that this figure
does vary.
additional storage changes are incurred when using the Time Travel and Fail-Safe
features.
I do not consider the cost of maintaining micro-partitions in this section but instead
focus upon the true storage cost.
You can find more information on the storage costs at
https://docs.snowflake.
com/en/user-guide/cost-exploring-data-storage
.
Block Devices
Data storage devices such as disk drives and NAND flash memory arrange data in
contiguous blocks, that is, data “chunks,” and are stored sequentially in storage. Field
Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) may also manage storage and data access.
In the old days, disk density was referenced in terms of partitions, segments,
formatting, sectors, and tracks with much effort expended to optimize expensive disk
storage. You might do the same today by de-fragmenting your local PC hard disk to
move disk blocks into contiguous segments, which speeds up file access as the disk read
head moves only to the start of the file and not across different locations to access file
segments.
I mention block devices because the manner in which storage is accessed has some
parallels within Snowflake; I will discuss these shortly.
ChaPTer 4
MiCro-ParTiTionS