[IanCal]

Snowflake is (amongst other things but primarily to me) SQL database as a service, designed for analytical queries over large datasets.

It separates compute and storage, so there's just a big ol' pile of data and tables, then it spins up large machines to crunch the data on demand.

Data storage is cheap and the machines are expensive per hour but running for shorter times, and with little to no ops work required it can be a cheap overall system.

Bunch of other features that are handy or vital depending on your use case (instant data sharing across accounts, for example).

I've used it to transform terabytes of JSON into nice relational tables for analysts to use with very little effort.

Hopefully that's a useful overview of what kind of thing it is and where it sits.