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.
Pricing
Pay-per-use: $2-4/credit-hour (compute) + ~$23/TB/month (storage)
Typical: $200-2,000/month for small teams, $10k+/month for heavy users
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
When NOT to Use It
❌ Transactional database needs (use Postgres)
❌ Small datasets (< 100GB, Postgres cheaper)
❌ Need sub-second query response (not optimized for OLTP)
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.