Snowflake

Overview

A cloud data warehouse, which is a large central store where a company keeps all its business data for analysis.

General use

Companies use it to bring data from many systems into one place, run big reports and analysis on it, and share data with partners.

Insight

Good at running big reports across a lot of company data without managing any infrastructure, and it keeps storage and compute separate so teams do not fight over resources. The pay-per-query model means a few careless heavy queries can run up a real bill. It is overkill and pricey for small data. Best once your data is too big for a normal database and several teams need it.