Snowflake SnowPro Certification Practice Test 2025 – Complete Exam Prep Guide

Snowflake's architecture is primarily based on two architectural types: Shared-Disk and Shared-Nothing.

The Shared-Disk architecture allows multiple compute nodes to access the same underlying storage without duplicating data. This leads to efficient data management, where the storage layer is decoupled from the compute layer. In Snowflake, this design is utilized to enable seamless data sharing and to allow various compute processes to access a common data set concurrently, without any conflicts.

The Shared-Nothing architecture, on the other hand, emphasizes scalability and high performance by employing independent compute clusters that do not share resources. Each compute node has its own memory and storage, which allows for high levels of parallel processing and avoids bottlenecks that could arise from resource contention. Snowflake uses this architecture for its compute resources, enabling users to spin up multiple independent clusters that can scale out quickly based on demand.

This combination of Shared-Disk and Shared-Nothing architectures allows Snowflake to provide a flexible and efficient data warehousing solution that benefits from both centralized storage and scalable computing power. Thus, the integration of these two architectural principles is fundamental to Snowflake's design, ensuring optimal performance, scalability, and ease of use.