2. Introduction

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a fully managed cloud data platform built on a new SQL engine. It supports ANSI SQL and works with structured and semi-structured data (JSON, Avro, Parquet, XML). It runs on AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Cloud Data Warehousing

Unlike traditional DW appliances (Teradata, Netezza) and cloud-first solutions (Redshift, BigQuery), Snowflake's unique architecture separates storage and compute completely, enabling near-infinite scalability and concurrent workload isolation.

Use Cases

Data warehousing and BI
Data lakes and data engineering
Data science and ML
Data sharing and data marketplaces
Real-time analytics

✏️ Exercise: Write down 3 use cases from your organization or projects where Snowflake could provide value. Consider existing data volumes, query patterns, and concurrency needs.