Snowflake

Snowflake is super fast, requires virtually no maintenance (no logs, indexes, tuning, etc.) and the pay per use price model scales perfectly with cyclical workloads which are common in data warehouse applications.

It does not natively support any real constraints such as uniqueness or referential integrity which requires the user to explicitly check all these things via stored procedures. The SQL worksheet GUI still has remove to improve but they have been rapidly enhancing it. It's not too uncommon to have brief outages but they are usually resolved within a few hours.

Snowflake is exteremely stable and easy to setup. I was able to turn it on and have a reliable Data Warehouse that didn't require me having a lot of cloud knowledge to administrate.
The database administration through the UI is intuitive and the Roles dynamic helps with implementing good data governance and compliance pratics inside the company.
Snowflake also offers user security options out of the box, which was a huge improvement for us. The doccumentation is very well written and SnowSQL offest a lot of useful functions. The main improvement on this front was how Snowflake treats JSON, which helped us a lot.

If your revenue is not on US dollars, Snowflake is an expensive product, there is no way around that. It is indeed a very good service that charges accordingly. We are using the smallest cluster possible and it was necessary to do some convincing inside the company to approve it for our budget. That being said, the smallest cluster we are using is more than enough for our needs and will be for a long time, so it will take a long time for this cost to increase again, but it was a pretty big budget increase initially.

The concept of Snowflake is so clever - mass amounts of micro-partitions of data, with the storage and compute separated. It is a smart product that enables so much functionality and capability. It is more than simply a database in the cloud, it is truly a feature-rich platform that offers a huge amount of functionality. I also very much like that role-based access is a fundamental part of it. Its data sharing features are terrific too.

Some things are a little tricky to figure out, like row-level policies the first time you do it, or data masking. There are no triggers. Scheduled tasks are a little limited. Stored procedures are not as simple as I'd like.

The thing that I like most about this software is really if you can think it you can do it with Snowflake. I mean as long as it deals with data. I first started at my company using oracle and I didn't stick with that for long because we adopted snowflake. When we started using snowflake my knowledge of SQL just jumped sky high. Instead of just selecting from tables, I was using cte's and partitions and all of that fun stuff. Snowflake made it super easy to understand and learn. The ability it has to handle the amount of columns that it does is amazing.

There is a little bit of a learning curve to get the hang of it. But on the surface it is just like any other sql language and you just have to figure out the different quirks that it has. I wish it could give data instantaneously and read my mind on what I want but that is pretty much impossible so I'm going to stick with what I have.