Optimize Snowflake data warehouses with Slingshot
Learn how Capital One Slingshot helps you adopt, manage and scale Snowflake data warehouses.
What is a Snowflake data warehouse?
A Snowflake data warehouse is a cloud-based SaaS data platform that allows businesses to store and analyze vast amounts of data in a scalable, secure and easy-to-use environment.
As companies develop a center of excellence for managing their data cloud, they are looking for ways to govern their data responsibly and optimize warehouse costs. And while Snowflake unlocks data with performance that enables near-infinite scalability, users are trying to get greater visibility into performance and find ways to increase efficiency around managing their workloads.
Using Capital One Slingshot for data warehouse management
Launched in June 2022, Capital One Slingshot helps businesses maximize the value of Snowflake, and provide new ways to manage and optimize warehouse costs. This article will provide 3 actionable tips for how Slingshot can help you to easily adopt, manage and scale your Snowflake data warehouses.
Gaining transparency for your queries across all Snowflake warehouses
Making sure queries are optimized for performance is critical to managing your Snowflake Data Cloud, and can be a time-consuming, manual process to diagnose inefficiencies. Snowflake users need the ability to monitor these queries more closely and be informed about their credit utilization as it happens. Slingshot complements Snowflake by enabling cost transparency across all warehouses in a single, more-granular view—including costliest queries.
When a costly query or user is discovered, you’ll receive a proactive alert that signals where you should invest your time in optimizing query performance. These alerts will direct you to dashboards that provide the necessary visibility you need to slice and dice your data and identify the costliest queries and the users or teams executing them.
Capital One Slingshot gives you actionable insights on your most expensive queries—giving you confidence in where you're spending time and providing the opportunity to quickly remedy inefficient queries and optimize Snowflake compute costs.
The insights dashboard can help uncover details on your costliest queries and what’s driving up compute costs
Limiting bottlenecks and reducing manual oversight
Snowflake allows you to scale your business, but managing and centralizing all that data could create bottlenecks and additional time spent managing warehouses. Slingshot provides a solution that helps you
- Set optimized warehouse sizes and schedules
- Automate critical governance processes
Slingshot’s self-service warehouse management capabilities help users streamline their workflows, limit bottlenecks and reduce manual oversight. An intuitive user-interface, built-in auditability and the ability to apply pre-populated warehouse templates make creating approval workflows and assigning requests more efficient—helping accelerate time-to-value for Snowflake. Users can also dynamically tune warehouse sizes and scaling policies, apply schedules and manage inactivity controls to right size warehouses.
In Slingshot, infrastructure changes can be made with just a few clicks, reducing the steps to manually execute commands—leading to faster optimization cycles.
With Slingshot, you’re able to save time managing Snowflake objects, optimize costs, and streamline Snowflake provisioning processes while adhering to governance requirements.
The self-service warehouse management helps provision your warehouse schedules and optimize Snowflake credits
Balancing costs and optimizing your Snowflake warehouses
As a Snowflake user, you want to ensure that your teams’ warehouse settings are balancing cost and performance—making sure your warehouse schedules and parameters are set up to account for the peaks and valleys of your business. In Snowflake, warehouses have to be managed and optimized manually, which can lead to challenges like identifying what you want to focus on and confidence in provisioning your warehouses.
Slingshot provides customers with data-driven recommendations on warehouse schedules that can be right-sized for both cost and performance based on the under or over-utilization of your warehouses. That means less time spent figuring out your cluster settings or how to rightsize your warehouse—all while saving your business money that would have been spent on unnecessary infrastructure settings.
Slingshot allows you to maximize the value out of your Snowflake spend and enables you with data-driven warehouse recommendations to help you optimize your data, and make it easier to rightsize your warehouses.
Slingshot provides recommendations to rightsize your warehouses
Book a demo of Slingshot to optimize your Snowflake warehouses
The flexibility of Snowflake helps companies unlock access to its data with performance that can enable near-infinite scalability. But all that data could present a challenge without the proper guardrails or insights into your Data Cloud - potentially leading to unexpected costs or inefficient workloads. Capital One Slingshot is a solution designed to optimize costs, reduce waste and inefficiencies and accelerate time-to-value of Snowflake, while adhering to governance requirements.
If you are looking to leverage data at scale, get in touch with Capital One Software for a demo to learn how you can activate and apply insights across your Snowflake environment today.
