Snowflake

Judgement

What it is

Complete system

What it does

A cloud data warehouse that separates storage from compute, for SQL analytics, data sharing and data engineering across AWS, Azure and GCP.

Adopt it when

A company has many data sources to combine for analytics and wants a managed warehouse that scales without tuning.

Watch out

Credit-based compute costs climb quickly without controls on warehouses and queries.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Cloud service

Built with

SQL

What the license allows

Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.

Judged on 2026-11-03 from the maker's description and Wikipedia. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Compare Snowflake

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Under it

Every program, Snowflake included, runs on a microchip.

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape