Snowflake
What it is: Cloud data warehouse. Auto-scaling, pay-per-use, separation of storage and compute.
What It Does Best
Scale without thinking. Query performance stays consistent. Add compute instantly, remove when done.
Multi-cloud. Runs on AWS, Azure, GCP. Same SQL, same features everywhere.
Zero maintenance. No servers to manage. No tuning. No indexes. Just write SQL.
Key Features
Separation of storage and compute: Scale independently, pause compute when not in use
Virtual warehouses: Multiple isolated compute clusters
Zero-copy cloning: Instant database copies for dev/test
Time Travel: Query historical data up to 90 days back
Data sharing: Share live data across accounts securely
Pricing
On-demand: $2-4/credit-hour (compute) + $23-40/TB/month (storage)
Pre-purchase: Discounts with upfront credit purchase
Typical cost: $200-2,000/month for small teams, $10k+/month for heavy users
Free trial: $400 credits to start
When to Use It
✅ Analytics on large datasets (TB+)
✅ Variable workload (scale up/down)
✅ Multiple teams needing different compute
✅ Don't want to manage infrastructure
✅ Need data sharing across organizations
When NOT to Use It
❌ Transactional database needs (use Postgres)
❌ Small datasets (< 100GB, Postgres cheaper)
❌ Need sub-second query response (not optimized for OLTP)
❌ Budget very tight (can get expensive)
❌ Heavy real-time streaming (use specialized tools)
Common Use Cases
Data warehouse: Central repository for business analytics
BI dashboards: Power Tableau, Looker, Power BI
Data science: Large-scale data preparation for ML
Data sharing: Share data with partners/customers
ELT pipelines: Load and transform data at scale
Snowflake vs Alternatives
vs BigQuery: Snowflake multi-cloud, BigQuery tighter Google integration
vs Redshift: Snowflake easier and often faster, Redshift cheaper on AWS
vs Databricks: Databricks better for ML/Spark, Snowflake better for SQL analytics
Unique Strengths
True multi-cloud: Same experience on AWS, Azure, GCP
Compute isolation: Workloads never interfere with each other
Zero-copy clone: Instant environments without data duplication
Data marketplace: Access to third-party data sets
Bottom line: Data warehouse made easy. Expensive for small use, but scales painlessly. If you're drowning in data and query performance, Snowflake solves it.