Free ยท Lesson 1 of 13
Snowflake is a cloud data platform. You do not install the database on your laptop.
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Think of a library. The books live in a warehouse that every reader can reach. The reading rooms are separate, and you can open a bigger room when the club arrives. A front desk checks cards, finds the shelf, and sends you to a room. Snowflake splits the job the same way: stored data, compute rooms called virtual warehouses, and a cloud-services desk.
Snowflake runs on a public cloud you choose: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Snowflake manages the software. You cannot install the service on your own machines.
The architecture is a hybrid. Stored data sits in one central place, like a shared-disk database. Queries run on massively parallel clusters that do not share their compute with each other, like a shared-nothing database.
| Layer | What it does | What you pay attention to |
|---|---|---|
| Database storage | Holds table data, including Time Travel and Fail-safe bytes | Storage grows when data changes and when history is kept |
| Compute | Virtual warehouses run SQL, DML, loads, and Snowpark code | Credits while a warehouse is running |
| Cloud services | Sign-in, access control, metadata, optimization, and query dispatch | A daily credit adjustment applies only after cloud services pass 10% of that day's warehouse usage |
A virtual warehouse is a cluster of compute. It is not the place your tables are stored. Two warehouses can query the same tables at the same time without sharing CPU.
Warehouses come in two types, Standard and Snowpark-optimized. Snowpark-optimized warehouses are the ones Snowflake recommends when the work needs a lot of memory, such as machine-learning training. Ordinary SQL can use a Standard warehouse.
Each warehouse has a size. On Generation 1 warehouses the documented hourly credits start at 1 for X-Small and double at each larger size through 6X-Large. Generation 2 warehouses can bill differently, so read the current credit table before you estimate a bill. Credits are billed per second with a 60-second minimum.
Each account has an edition: Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical, or Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS). Higher editions add features. They do not change the three-layer shape.
Standard includes virtual warehouses, resource monitors, one day of Time Travel, and Fail-safe. Enterprise adds multi-cluster warehouses, extended Time Travel up to 90 days, masking policies, row access policies, materialized views, search optimization, and query acceleration. Business Critical adds stronger network isolation, Tri-Secret Secure, and failover. VPS isolates the account from other Snowflake customers' hardware.
Unit prices also depend on region and on whether the account is On Demand or Capacity. This course does not invent a price. Use Snowflake's current pricing page for numbers.
Snowflake has three layers. Click each step to see which layer does the work.
Step 1 of 3Before any compute runs, cloud services checks your login and role, plans the query, and uses metadata to decide which pieces of the table it can skip.
SELECT * FROM orders WHERE order_date = '2026-10-01';Step 2 of 3The warehouse does the actual reading and calculating. It wakes up for the query and is billed per second, with a 60-second minimum each time it resumes.
USE WAREHOUSE compute_wh;Step 3 of 3The table lives once, in compressed column files called micro-partitions. Storage is billed separately from compute, so a table nobody queries still costs storage but no compute.
SHOW TABLES IN SCHEMA analytics.public;You can run this in any Snowflake worksheet after the next lesson creates an account. It only reads your session. It does not create objects.
SELECT CURRENT_ACCOUNT() AS account_name,
CURRENT_REGION() AS region_name,
CURRENT_WAREHOUSE() AS warehouse_name,
CURRENT_ROLE() AS role_name;
Checked against Snowflake documentation in October 2026. Product behavior still depends on your edition, cloud, and region.