Snowflake
Cloud data warehouse built from scratch for the cloud — Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, Marcin Zukowski, 2012. Separates compute (warehouses) from storage (micro-partitions in S3/GCS/Azure Blob).
SQL-first, multi-cluster shared data. "Zero-copy clones" via copy-on-write. Snowpark (2021) brings a DataFrame API in Python/Scala/Java. Snowflake Cortex (2024) integrates LLM functions directly into SQL.
IPO in 2020, the largest software IPO ever at the time. Competitors: BigQuery (GCP), Redshift (AWS), Databricks Lakehouse, ClickHouse. Market leader in "managed data warehouse".