Currently, I generate data on a different datastore and replicate to Snowflake Staging, then that data moves to the Data Warehouse DB through ELT ingestion for Analytics purpose. However this approach can be considered as creating data-silos in itself, since we already have 3 copies of the same data:
Transactional data-store DB
Replicated snowflake staging
Snowflake Data Warehouse DB
From a technical architecture point of view, is it a good idea to use Snowflake as a direct datastore for transactional application? (application that does many CRUD operations). That may help in avoiding the cost of replication and ingestion.
The main problem I see with this approach is that: Snowflake does not enforce any referential integrity (primary keys, foreign keys) so within the CRUD app, I have to either use a MERGE statement always or somehow make sure I don't create duplicate records.
The other problem being in the cloud, the distance (aka network) between the app and snowflake decides the performance of the transactions, I want good, consistent performance of my CRUD operations.
Any thoughts/suggestions are much appreciated.