News

Snowflake is now available on Twilio Segment

Mar 20, 2018

By Doug Roberge


Most companies struggle to build a single source of truth for every interaction with their customers because they have data siloed in scores of different tools. Often, they don’t realize the full extent of an engineering investment to bring all of their data together until they embark on an infamous “data lake” project. Not anymore.

To help you access your data without the extra leg work, we’ve added Snowflake to the Segment platform as a new data warehouse Destination. 

Break out of the box

While standard analytics tools give you a good sense of what actions customers are taking, you can only do so much with an out-of-the-box tool. You’ll need a data warehouse to incorporate all data sources so that data can be queried in its rawest form. With a data warehouse, you’re prepared to answer business critical questions. 

How much revenue is at stake from unanswered support tickets? What percent of customers renew after using a certain set of product features? A data warehouse helps deliver these insights in a scalable way by unifying customer data and preventing data silos. Armed with the right insights, you can more effectively drive product design and development, evaluate marketing campaign effectiveness, and spot potential issues in your user experience. 

Segment + Snowflake: Easy to implement, scale, and manage

With Segment and Snowflake, you don’t have to build your own ETL pipeline to stream data from your mobile apps and websites into a data warehouse. You can also stream data from other sources like your CRM, help desk, payment systems, or email marketing tools. Segment schematizes and loads all of this data for you with no extra configuration required. Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse adjusts to your scale automatically and supports fast queries, no matter how many analysts access it at once. 

Automating this process will save your engineering team a significant amount of time. On average, our customers reported it would take 108 engineering hours up front and 40 hours of maintenance per month to implement a warehouse pipeline on their own. With Segment, that time shrinks to just a few minutes spent authorizing your Snowflake account.

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Why choose Snowflake?

Selecting the right data warehouse for your business is no easy task. There are a number of strong solutions on the market, each with a slightly different feature set and sweet spot. To make the right choice you need to consider how much data you need to store, how quickly and often you’ll need to access it, and your engineering team’s experience managing a warehouse. These factors will dictate the best and most cost-efficient choice for you.

What makes Snowflake different from the other options out there? Here are some key benefits:

  • Instant, unlimited scalability. Snowflake’s multi-cluster cloud architecture is able to scale up and down automatically based on usage. Snowflake’s infrastructure separates storage from compute clusters so loading and querying can happen at the same time. This guarantees that your queries will be fast no matter how much data is being stored or how many people are accessing it. Their architecture can also reduce cost because you only pay for compute when you use it.

  • Standard SQL.You can get up and running faster because your analysts won’t need to learn a new language. Snowflake uses standard syntax for data warehouses, which means you can write your queries with standard SQL. 

  • No management burden. With Snowflake, all you have to do is run queries. It's fully managed and has no infrastructure or admin costs. Snowflake doesn’t require any indexes, list keys, partitioning, or vacuuming. As a result, you don’t have to dedicate your team’s time to making sure that your warehouse stays fast and efficient.

There are a number of Segment customers already using the integration including Yesware, Handshake, and Doximity. Doximity, a social network for medical professionals, saved days of engineering effort by using Segment to switch to Snowflake. 

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Get your data into Snowflake today

Check out the full setup instructions here to get your data loading into Snowflake today.  

Still deciding which warehouse to use? Learn why Doximity and Yesware chose Snowflake in our upcoming webinar on April 19, 2018 at 11am PT.

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