Why Low-Latency Access to Data Is Key for Data Analytics Success in Snowflake

Access to timely insights is a key competitive differentiator across markets, and data is the lifeblood of that advantage. Faster, better insights empower business leaders to make better decisions, stay several steps ahead of the competition and innovate in their markets.

Streaming access to business-ready data is key to achieving market leadership. While businesses benefit from low latency access to operational data, this data is stored across diverse business systems, such as application databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and software as a service (SaaS) applications.

The faster you can access this raw data and bring it into your target source for data analytics, the better you can meet your real-time analytical and decision-making objectives. However, the challenge of connecting diverse data sources — especially multiple ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) systems in a fast and timely manner — remains a pressing concern for data engineers.

You need the right tool to connect your data sources quickly and at scale so your data flows uninterrupted for transformation and orchestration and, ultimately, for business analytics and AI use cases.

Popular data warehouses, such as Snowflake and Databricks, have thriving marketplaces where multiple tools and options for data ingestion, replication, transformation and orchestration compete for your attention. However, this abundance can become a challenge, especially if your organization has data users who lack deep data engineering skills. It can also make it difficult to perform data integration and data management tasks quickly and easily.

When choosing a data integration tool, you should consider the latency, ease of use, performance, speed, cost optimization and scalability. This is where the Snowflake native Enterprise Data Integrator (EDI) from Informatica stands out in the Snowflake apps marketplace.

The easiest way for Snowflake ecosystem users to integrate data to and from the Snowflake Data Cloud is with EDI, a Snowflake native app currently in public preview.

EDI provides connectivity to different data sources and high-speed data ingestion and replication from multiple systems to Snowflake. It delivers by far the smoothest data integration experience, all within the Snowflake console.

Let’s walk through the checklist of everything you need for low-latency access to data and how Informatica EDI stands out against other tools in the marketplace to address those needs.

1.    Performance Optimized for Snowflake

Ingestion — or extracting the data from multiple sources — can be challenging, especially from CRM and ERP sources. For EDI, Informatica and Snowflake have collaborated closely and optimized the data ingestion and replication process for Snowflake cloud data warehouse, which enables data ingestion up to 3.5 to 4 times faster. Plus, the power of the Informatica AI-powered metadata engine CLAIRE helps automate your entire data pipeline development within the Snowflake interface, bringing in unmatched and intelligent efficiency and effectiveness.

2.    Truly Native

Informatica EDI is the first Snowflake native vendor to provide complete end-to-end data ingestion and replication solutions within the Snowflake environment. Now, you can ingest data from Oracle and SAP at scale into Snowflake. And since it's native to Snowflake, you can ingest and replicate data at optimal performance without leaving your Snowflake environment.

3.    Convenient

Deploying multiple point solutions for various data integration tasks, be it data ingestion or change data capture (CDC), typically means logging into and working with different user interfaces. With EDI, Snowflake users can access the full capabilities of the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform through a single drag-and-drop interface within the familiar Snowflake console in just a few clicks. This makes data integration particularly convenient and helpful for data engineers who prefer a low-code solution. It’s also beneficial for data engineers who may not have deep engineering expertise and want an easy path to complete their data integration tasks so they can focus on strategic or business-oriented tasks instead.

4.    High Speed

With EDI, you can quickly access critical enterprise data in your cloud data warehouse. Being a Snowflake native app, EDI’s accessibility and ease of use means you can take action on your data sooner — accelerating time to insights and value.

5.    Easy to Use

With an easy sign-up process directly from the Snowflake marketplace and a simple wizard-driven interface, you can start moving high volumes of data in a few steps without writing any code. If you prefer to avoid manual coding and work with the scale, speed and ease of no-code data integration experiences, just connect, select the data you want to bring into Snowflake and set up replication to start accessing and analyzing data with unprecedented performance and latency

The seamless integration capabilities of EDI come from Superpipe. This leverages Snowflake’s Snowpipe Streaming API — which enables the low-latency ingestion of streaming rows directly into Snowflake tables with ordered ingestion and high scalability — and Informatica Cloud Data Integration Platform and Engineering — which can replicate data faster onto Snowflake.

Superpipe enables you to replicate and stream both initial and incremental data changes up to 3.5x faster than standard CDC approaches. You will also be able to query the replicated data in Snowflake in near-real time and benefit from the overall cost reduction due to the serverless nature of Snowpipe Streaming, which doesn’t require running any Snowflake compute to ingest data.

Informatica EDI meets you where you are, giving you the best of data ingestion, replication and integration capabilities right within your Snowflake environment.

Get started in just a few steps:

• Go to Snowflake native apps marketplace and search for “Informatica Enterprise Data Integrator”


 

• Choose EDI



• Follow a few easy wizard-guided steps to start moving data effortlessly
• Try EDI for free for 30 days and experience the next level of seamless data integration without ever leaving the Snowflake environment.