Snowflake's mission revolves around making data accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone. One of the pillars that have made Snowflake an industry leader is its unwavering commitment to being easy to use and turnkey.

The digital landscape of today presents a multitude of data handling platforms and processes, requiring diverse expertise. It's become clear that understanding the division of roles is critical, particularly the distinction between Data Engineers and Database Administrators (DBAs).

Moser Consulting was recently tasked with reducing costs and ensuring more consistent SLA compliance in a company's Snowflake environment. While Snowflake differs from traditional and other cloud databases, it is still a SQL-based database, and many of the same tuning techniques apply. However, understanding Snowflake's architecture is crucial, as it offers unique cost-saving opportunities not found in traditional databases.

Recently, I stumbled upon a blog by Felipe Hoffa that detailed using Cloudflare R2 as the data storage location for external tables in Snowflake. I had a project that required less than 5 GB of storage per month, and I wanted to avoid paying for storage if possible. Therefore, I decided to experiment with Cloudflare's free tier as my data lake. The results were nothing short of impressive.

For the second year in a row, Snowflake has been named the Database of the Year by DB-Engines. Over the past couple of years, it has climbed the popularity rankings, currently sitting at #11. Snowflake is a cloud data platform designed for analytical, AI, and ML use cases. As a cloud-native solution, its architecture differs significantly from traditional databases like SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.