What is Snowflake
A data warehouse sold as a cloud service. Companies load their data in and analysts query it with SQL.
In plain terms
Snowflake is a data warehouse that runs entirely as a paid cloud service, hosted on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. It separated storage from computing power, so companies pay for queries only while they run. It became the default warehouse at mid-size and large companies, with BigQuery and Redshift as the main alternatives.
What it tells you about a developer
Snowflake experience places someone in the analytics stack: warehouse SQL, data modeling, and usually dbt alongside. Skills here transfer readily to BigQuery or Redshift, since all three are queried in SQL. A person who has managed Snowflake cost, which is billed by usage, has run analytics at a scale where the bill got attention.
Facts
- Type
- Database
- Released
- 2015
- Used in
- Data engineering
Someone who knows Snowflake also knows
Related
Read the lesson on Snowflake More in Who does what on a team