Behind the Snowflake Name

One of the questions that we get the most is, "Why did you decide to name the company Snowflake?"

I'm sure our marketing department has their opinion of what we should say, but let me give you the real story. The name "Snowflake" just fit us in several ways:

• Snowflakes are "born in the cloud" For a data warehouse built from the ground up for the cloud, that's very important.
• We love the snow. Most of our founding team, and even our first investor, love to spend time up in the mountains in winter. They even convinced me to try skiing (and took me on a black run my first day).
• Each Snowflake is unique. One of the really cool things about our architecture is that it lets you have as many "virtual warehouses" as you need, all in one system, each of which has exactly the right resources to fit the unique needs of each set of your users and workloads.

And, conveniently, "Snowflake" happens to have a meaning in the world of data warehousing--a data warehouse schema organized as multiple dimension tables surrounding a set of fact tables is one of the data architectures that we can support.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Marcin