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Carlin Eng's avatar

S3 alone makes for a poor data warehouse because of boring issues like access control. It's far easier to maintain roles and privileges in Snowflake than in AWS IAM. Additionally, features like dynamic row-level and column-level data masking aren't really possible with S3 alone.

Transactional consistency is also a problem. Multi-table transactions aren't natively supported, which makes failure recovery in multi-step transformation jobs more complicated. Instead of simply rolling back a transaction, you're stuck manually cleaning out bad data.

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David Andersen's avatar

Nothing you referenced is a data warehouse.

A DW is the end result of specific methods to collect and organize data for analytics.

A DW is to arbitrary data sitting in S3 as a church is to a pile of lumber.

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