How Do People Use Snowflake and Redshift?

The average Snowflake customer spends about $300,000 per year on the platform, with 90% of this being queries. Data warehouses are primarily used as ETL tools, and most queries are small, scanning around 100 MB. Massively parallel processing (MPP) systems like Snowflake and Redshift distribute data across multiple computers for query execution, but specialized engines can be more efficient for specific workloads. The future of data warehouses may lie in data lakes, which separate storage into vendor-neutral formats and allow multiple specialized execution engines to interact with the same data, improving efficiency and user experience.