Motivation for Snowflake: separation of storage/compute, scales independently; near-infinite concurrency; built-in time travel, cloning; zero-copy cloning for dev/test; automatic optimization (clustering, compression); multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP); SQL-native; ecosystem (dbt, Fivetran); manageability (no vacuum, tuning). Appeal: modern, cloud-native, minimal ops. **Why it matters**: Design choices compound at scale—wrong approach can cause 100× overhead....
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