Case Study: Square achieves petabyte-scale analytics and stronger fraud protection with Snowflake

Square Helps Merchants Grow And Avoid Risk With Snowflake

Square builds point-of-sale, commerce, marketing, operations, and banking tools to help merchants start, run, and grow their businesses, and it ingests large volumes of structured and semi-structured data to drive product and risk decisions. Rapidly expanding data volumes on its legacy Vertica system caused outages, high maintenance, and resource contention that prevented firm SLAs and limited queries at month end, prompting Square to pursue a cloud data-warehouse solution.

Square migrated to Snowflake’s multi-cluster shared data architecture, storing more than one petabyte (including JSON) and using multi-cloud, governance, and access-control features to create a single source of truth. The move eliminated resource contention, enabled self-service analytics, sped product-insight generation (including COVID-era recommendations and a pandemic gift-card program), strengthened fraud and risk detection, saved analyst time, and improved on-time delivery of critical financial data.

Square

Randy Wigginton

Senior Director, Platform Infrastructure Engineering