Snowflake

Snowflake is a fully managed cloud data platform centered on a SQL data warehouse. Its architecture separates storage from compute: independent virtual warehouses scale and pause individually against shared data, and per-second billing follows that model.

Beyond core warehousing, the platform includes cross-account data sharing, support for semi-structured data, external and managed Iceberg tables, and in-platform compute for Python and other languages.

Snowflake runs as a managed service across the major clouds. It is a common default choice for analytical SQL workloads where operational simplicity is prioritized, and is typically evaluated against BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks SQL, and open lakehouse stacks.