There is no hardware (virtual or physical) to select, install, configure, or manage. There is virtually no software to install, configure, or manage. Ongoing maintenance, management, upgrades, and tuning are handled by our technology Partner.

The service runs completely on cloud infrastructure. All components of the service (other than optional command line clients, drivers, and connectors), run in public cloud infrastructures. It uses virtual compute instances for its compute needs and a storage service for persistent storage of data.

The Product cannot be run on private cloud infrastructures (on-premises or hosted). It is not a packaged software offering that can be installed by a user. Our Partner manages all aspects of software installation and updates.

The architecture is a hybrid of traditional shared-disk and shared-nothing database architectures. Similar to shared-disk architectures, the Partner uses a central data repository for persisted data that is accessible from all compute nodes in the platform. But similar to shared-nothing architectures, it processes queries using MPP (massively parallel processing) compute clusters where each node in the cluster stores a portion of the entire data set locally. This approach offers the data management simplicity of a shared-disk architecture, but with the performance and scale-out benefits of a shared-nothing architecture.

Database Storage

When data is loaded , It is reorganizes that data into its internal optimized, compressed, columnar format. Product stores this optimized data in cloud storage. Our Partner manages all aspects of how this data is stored — the organization, file size, structure, compression, metadata, statistics, and other aspects of data storage are handled by our partner too. The data objects stored are not directly visible nor accessible by customers; they are only accessible through SQL query operations run using our partner service.

Query Processing

Query execution is performed in the processing layer. Our Partner processes queries using “virtual warehouses”. Each virtual warehouse is an MPP compute cluster composed of multiple compute nodes allocated by our Partner from a cloud provider. Each virtual warehouse is an independent compute cluster that does not share compute resources with other virtual warehouses. As a result, each virtual warehouse has no impact on the performance of other virtual warehouses.

Cloud Services

The cloud services layer is a collection of services that coordinate activities across the Platform. These services tie together all of the different components of the Platform in order to process user requests, from login to query dispatch. The cloud services layer also runs on compute instances provisioned by our Partner from the cloud provider. Services managed in this layer include: Authentication Infrastructure management Metadata management Query parsing and optimization Access control