Snowflake

Snowflake (Cloud Data Warehouse)

A cloud-native data warehouse that separates storage from compute — meaning you pay for the two independently and can scale each on its own.

When you'd see it: Anywhere a company is on the modern data stack. Snowflake is a vendor, but the name shows up in conversation the way "the cloud" or "the warehouse" does — a stand-in for the analytical database the business runs on. Direct competitors: BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift.

Why it matters: Snowflake's storage-and-compute split was the architectural shift that made the modern data stack economically viable. Before it, scaling analytical workloads meant paying for unused capacity all the time. The model spread to every major cloud warehouse and became the new default.

Common mistakes: Confusing Snowflake with Snowflake Inc.'s entire product surface. The core warehouse is the well-known part, but the company also sells data sharing, an app platform, and AI tooling — and the vendor's marketing will treat all of it as "Snowflake." When someone says "we use Snowflake," they almost always mean the warehouse.

Related SQL, ETL