Q: Is Snowflake a data warehouse or a data lake?
A: Both. It's a data platform that supports warehousing workloads (structured, BI) and lake workloads (semi-structured, ELT).
Q: How does Snowflake compare to Redshift / BigQuery?
A: Snowflake offers better concurrency isolation via separate warehouses, easier management (no tuning), and cross-cloud portability. Redshift is cheaper at very large scale. BigQuery has auto-scaling but less predictable pricing.
Q: When should I use Snowpipe vs COPY INTO?
A: Use Snowpipe for continuous, near-real-time ingestion. Use COPY INTO for batch/scheduled loads.
Q: Does Snowflake charge for queries that hit result cache?
A: No. Result cache queries don't consume warehouse credits.