Snowflake

Snowflake's key architectural innovation is separating compute from storage — unlike traditional warehouses (Teradata, Netezza) or even early cloud warehouses (Redshift) that tie together storage and compute capacity. In Snowflake, you store data in S3/Azure Blob/GCS (billed per TB) and run query processing on virtual warehouses (clusters of compute, billed per second of use). You can spin up multiple warehouses of different sizes for different workloads (ETL, BI, data science) without contention. Virtual warehouses auto-suspend when idle, eliminating wasted costs. This model, plus zero-copy cloning, time travel, and cross-account data sharing, makes Snowflake far more flexible than provisioned warehouse models.

Snowflake pricing has two components: compute (Snowflake Credits) and storage. Storage is $23–40/TB/month depending on region. Compute credits cost $2/credit (Standard), $3/credit (Enterprise), or $4/credit (Business Critical). A Small virtual warehouse (1 Credit/hour) costs $2–4/hour, Medium (2 Credits/hour) $4–8/hour, Large (4 Credits/hour) $8–16/hour. Most organizations spend $1,000–50,000/month depending on data volume and query frequency. Snowflake's consumption model means costs correlate directly with usage — but poorly optimized queries, forgetting to suspend warehouses, or excessive data scanning can cause bill shock. Pre-purchased Credits (Capacity pricing) reduce per-credit costs by 30–40% vs on-demand.

BigQuery is better for organizations on Google Cloud, teams that want serverless architecture (no warehouse sizing decisions), and workloads with spiky or unpredictable query patterns — BigQuery scales automatically with no idle costs. BigQuery's flat-rate pricing ($10,000/month for 500 slots) is predictable for high-frequency workloads. Snowflake is better for multi-cloud environments (runs on AWS/Azure/GCP), organizations that need cross-organizational data sharing (Snowflake Marketplace and Data Sharing are more mature), and workloads requiring strict query isolation (separate virtual warehouses prevent resource contention). Financial services firms often prefer Snowflake's Business Critical tier with HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2 Type II compliance.