As we expand SnowMirror’s capabilities, one of our top priorities is that our tool can be used by any business regardless of their preferred data platform. We already support on-premise databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL, as well as cloud-managed DBs such as AWS RDS or Azure SQL. As of today we’re supporting Snowflake, an increasingly popular choice used by over a thousand enterprise companies worldwide.
Snowflake is a data warehouse built for the cloud, making it a perfect fit for SnowMirror. The platform is designed to easily amass all your data, enable rapid analytics, and quickly make data insights available to all of your users, consumers, and systems that need them. Snowflake was built with broad support for standard SQL to leverage your current skills and tools. Updates, deletes, analytical functions, transactions, and complex joins give full capabilities to make use of your data.
Data and BI teams are now able to manage their ServiceNow data better than ever before. With SnowMirror, you can simply replicate ServiceNow data to Snowflake directly without an intermediate staging area. This will ensure that your ServiceNow data is always loaded and updated correctly and that you can automate these processes to focus on getting the best insights. Managing and maintaining a state-of-the-art data infrastructure has never been easier and with these tools you’ll be able to instantly manipulate, transform, and analyze your ServiceNow data efficiently.
We welcome all Snowflake users to try SnowMirror and leverage the combined power of both platforms to manage data efficiently in the cloud. Please download SnowMirror now and evaluate it in your own environment.
Tuesday, September 24, 3:00 pm BST | 10:00 am EST
Performance and data throughput is one of the most important topics for ServiceNow data replication. It is necessary to understand the factors driving SnowMirror performance and be aware of settings impacting the replication speed.
The webinar is designed for existing SnowMirror users and evaluating customers as well. Together we will uncover the replication architecture as well as details about SnowMirror algorithms. The speaker, SnowMirror consultant, will provide useful tips and tricks and best practices.
Agenda
- Replication architecture and its impact on performance
- ServiceNow nodes – performance settings
- SnowMirror statistics
- Delete strategy – the performance killer
- Non-updating tables – fine-tuning their synchronizations
- Advanced performance settings
Speakers
Pavel Müller
SnowMirror Consultant
GuideVision
SnowMirror product manager and ServiceNow architect focusing on integrations.
Webinar Recording:
Wednesday, September 18, 3:00 pm BST | 10:00 am EST
Join us for a webinar demonstrating SnowMirror settings beyond basics. The topics will include delete strategies, schema updates and resolving data inconsistencies.
The webinar is designed for existing SnowMirror users and evaluating customers as well. It will not include SnowMirror basics. Please watch the SnowMirror Demo webinar to get ready for this second step.
Agenda
- Delete strategy
- Auto schema update
- Consistency check
- Differential synchronization
- General settings – temporary tables, index replication, etc.
- Edit mappings
- Advanced synchronization settings
Speakers
Pavel Müller
SnowMirror Consultant
GuideVision
SnowMirror product manager and ServiceNow architect focusing on integrations.
Thursday, April 23, 4:00 pm BST | 11:00 am EDT
Unfortunately, this webinar has ended, but you can still watch the recording by clicking the button “Watch a Recording”.
Join us for a webinar demonstrating SnowMirror settings beyond basics. The topics will include delete strategies, schema updates and resolving data inconsistencies.
The webinar is designed for existing SnowMirror users and evaluating customers as well. It will not include SnowMirror basics. Please watch the SnowMirror Demo webinar to get ready for this second step.
Agenda
- Delete strategy
- Auto schema update
- Consistency check
- Differential synchronization
- General settings – temporary tables, index replication, etc.
- Edit mappings
- Advanced synchronization settings
Speakers
Pavel Müller
SnowMirror Consultant
GuideVision
SnowMirror product manager and ServiceNow architect focusing on integrations.
DxSherpa has a great article that includes a step-by-step guide on how to set up external ServiceNow reporting using the most popular BI tools, Tableau and Qlik.
https://dxsherpa.com/blogs/integration-of-tableau-and-qlikview-with-servicenow-using-snow-mirror/
Please let us announce the new stable SnowMirror release 4.3. This is a Madrid-compatible release and it also contains an important infrastructure upgrade including Java 11 and Tomcat 9.
IMPORTANT – Users on Linux or users with additional installation adjustments have to finish the upgrade with several manual steps. Please check the Release Notes for more details.
Madrid Compatible Release – SnowMirror has been tested with the latest ServiceNow Madrid release and it is fully compatible with it. As always, SnowMirror stays compatible with the old releases, at least back to Jakarta.
Technology Stack Upgrade – SnowMirror upgrades to Java 11, OpenJDK, and Apache Tomcat 9. This change resolves the new commercial Java licensing conditions by using the open-source version.
Attachment Replication Performance – Improved performance of attachment synchronizations. A synchronization can download data from multiple ServiceNow connections at once.
Please read the detailed release notes for more information about new features and fixes.
SnowMirror is a proud sponsor and exhibitor of the Knowledge 2019 conference, ServiceNow’s annual event for customers and partners. Knowledge 2019 will be held 5-9 May 2019 in Las Vegas, and SnowMirror will be at booth #554 for visitors to discuss its features and benefits directly with our consultants. Learn how SnowMirror can replicate ServiceNow data locally to deliver reports on your preferred platform and can help simplify ServiceNow integrations.
The SnowMirror management team will be available to discuss cooperation with other ServiceNow partners. GuideVision, our sister company and Gold ServiceNow Services Partner, will also exhibit at Knowledge 2019.
Knowledge 2019 is ServiceNow’s premiere event, and attracted more than 20,000 attendees and more than 2,500 partners last year. This year’s event will be held at The Venetian & Sands Expo Center, and will feature a wide variety of talks, sessions, trainings and exhibitors. We look forward to seeing you there!
The SnowMirror 4.2 release contains a set of smaller feature requests including changes in synchronizations of certain table types, changes in Auto Schema Updates and it also supports SAML-based single sign-on.
IMPORTANT – Upgrade to this version requires access to several new ServiceNow system tables (i.e. sys_table_rotation, sys_table_rotation_schedule, sys_archive_log, sys_properties). Please adjust the permissions for your SnowMirror user account according to the Release Notes. Table Rotation Support – SnowMirror can read rotation/extension tables directly from ServiceNow shards, thus improving the performance of the replication. It can also be configured to store data into multiple mirror tables (i.e. one mirror table per shard). Configurable Synchronization Execution – A new “Synchronize…” feature enables to run a synchronization and to choose all possible settings how to run it. E.g. threading options, dry run mode, differential load with checking missing updates, etc. Auto Schema Update (no truncation) – A new option “Enabled (no truncation)” which does not truncate a mirror table when a new column is created. There is also a possibility to exclude a column from Auto Schema Update. Single Sign-On Authentication – SnowMirror can authenticate users using single sign-on over SAML 2.0 protocol and Web SSO profile. Data Archiving Support – The support for the ServiceNow data archiving plug-in has been available since SnowMirror 3.8. However, it was a bit hidden. Since 4.2 it is possible to enable the archiving support which checks for archived/restored records as well as enables replicating archiving tables (i.e. tables starting with ar_). There is a lot of other smaller features in this release. Please check out the detailed release notes.There is an interesting discussion SnowMirror vs. ODBC driver on the ServiceNow Community. This is a topic touching the original motivation for creating SnowMirror. We have been developing SnowMirror since 2012 and the need for such a tool is still there, the ServiceNow technology has simply not changed. If you want to access ServiceNow data then there is either SOAP or REST API. Unlike other cloud platforms, there is no bulk API to extract high data volumes. The REST and SOAP APIs are designed as transactional APIs to work with a single record or smaller record lists. There is also no direct access to the underlying ServiceNow database. Neither customers nor consultants are able to query the database directly.
That’s why the ServiceNow ODBC driver is not a proper database driver as the name might suggest. It is just a wrapper around the SOAP API sending web service calls over HTTP for every SQL query. This results in limited features because you cannot send complicated database queries over simple SOAP API. Also, the queries are sent sequentially, using one HTTP connection and one thread. By contrast, SnowMirror is designed as a data replication tool with high data throughput in mind. It uses the same API as the ODBC driver but the key thing is to use the API and the whole ServiceNow instance in the most efficient way. Here are the most important areas making SnowMirror faster than other solutions:
- Incremental load – SnowMirror downloads just the deltas; only the new and updated records and it removes the deleted items. This enables it to work even with the largest tables.
- Smart pagination. SnowMirror uses special algorithms for handling batches. It downloads a batch of primary keys (sys_ids) first and then it downloads smaller chunks of actual data.
- Concurrency. SnowMirror is able to download a single table in multiple threads which are increasing performance significantly.
- Instance utilization – and this is the most important point for bigger instances. SnowMirror is able to maintain sessions with individual ServiceNow nodes which boosts performance and data throughput dramatically.
The last point is making the biggest difference when comparing just the data throughput. Let’s explain it by the following picture.
SnowMirror is able to identify individual ServiceNow nodes and maintain two sessions (configurable) with each node separately. This increases the number of replication threads, especially for bigger ServiceNow instances. Most of the instances have only two nodes, but the bigger the instance the more nodes it has. There are ServiceNow customers with 16 or even more nodes. Then a single table synchronization can utilize all of the sessions/connection to download data concurrently. This is a major difference comparing to an ODBC driver. Imagine a bigger ServiceNow instance with 8 nodes. In this case, SnowMirror is 16 times faster compared to ODBC. And this is taking into account only a theoretical data throughput and not the effects of smart pagination and other features.
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