Snowflake is an incredibly powerful data and database storage solution that has been receiving a lot of attention since its IPO. It's no surprise why it's been so popular; Snowflake is a well-designed, smart product that is the best in its class. It offers a clean interface that provides a sensible playing field to support all your analytical data storage activities, and you can even visualize the data with Snowflake. The decoupled storage and compute work together seamlessly and make scaling simple.
Microclustering was a concern from the start, but it works great. You may need some suggestions here and there, but compared to Teradata or large scale Postgres, it's very easy to use and it works. The permissions model is also very clean, and the documentation is excellent (especially compared to Teradata or Spark). Snowflake also works great as a processing backbone in Spark (see the Snowflake controller for the Spark Catalyst optimizer).
Ingestion tools work well for ETL, but they are probably better for ELT, which means less logic in dumb ETL tools. The query optimizer has been accurate 95% of the time, and when it isn't, the plans and tools are excellent (again, we compare it to Teradata). Backup and time travel features are also very powerful. The ignition time is very fast due to the hot wait times.
And one of the most important things for me is that the extensions of the SQL language are clear and consistent. There is very little magic or incoherent syntax.The biggest advantage of Snowflake is that several users can execute several queries simultaneously. This makes it an ideal solution for businesses that need to process large amounts of data quickly and efficiently.
