What is a snowflake data warehouse?
Simply so, what is Snowflake built on?
Snowflake is a cloud data warehouse built on top of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure and is a true SaaS offering. There is no hardware (virtual or physical) for you to select, install, configure, or manage. There is no software for you to install, configure, or manage.
Similarly one may ask, what is Snowflake used for?
Snowflake is a cloud-based Data Warehouse solution provided as a Saas (Software-as-a-Service) with full support for ANSI SQL. It also has a unique architecture that enables users to just create tables and start querying data with very less administration or DBA activities needed.
It is a columnar-stored relational database and works well with Tableau, Excel and many other tools familiar to end users. Snowflake has its own query tool, supports role-based security, multi-statement transactions, full DML, windowing functions and everything else expected in a SQL database.