Snowflake is a data analytics platform that has gained popularity due to its excellent performance when running business intelligence and data analytics queries. The term "data warehouse" refers to any service or computing infrastructure used to store analytical data, but Snowflake's concept of "virtual warehouses" is slightly different, as they are compute engines similar to virtual machines, used to scale up Snowflake. While many people refer to Snowflake as a data warehouse, it is actually a data management system designed for business intelligence activities and analytics. The main advantage of using Snowflake as a data warehouse or data lake is its performance when processing huge amounts of data, especially when running complex analytical queries. However, this comes at the cost of slower transactional performance compared to traditional database technologies. Additionally, Snowflake's virtual warehouses are optimized for single-user access, requiring custom data engineering to handle concurrent user demands, which is where Propel Data comes in as a solution to bridge the gap between Snowflake and customer-facing data apps.