[donalhunt]

You can definitely bring your own storage (e.g. store your data in your own s3 buckets and integrate it with snowflake) using storage integrations and external tables.

See https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/data-load-s3-config...

Personally believe this is the right approach as the data resides in a location fully under the company's control. You could ditch snowflake and the data still resides in your s3 buckets for reuse with a another platform (just remove the iam permissions for snowflake).

[billythemaniam]

Yes, federated queries (external tables) are supported but that is a lot slower than ingesting the data into Snowflake's storage and querying it. Since Snowflake's pricing model is based on computation time, querying external tables are usually more costly because of worse performance.

[darth_avocado]

And the network ingress/egress costs are higher for cross account/region transfers.