Snowflake architecture is a hybrid of traditional shared-disk and shared-nothing database architectures.

• A. True
• B. False
• C. A single-node architecture
• D. A shared-disk only architecture

Answer: (A)

Snowflake uses centralized storage that all compute clusters access, while the compute work is handled by independent, scalable virtual warehouses. This decoupling of storage from compute lets multiple warehouses run concurrently against the same data without stepping on each other, and a separate cloud services layer manages metadata and transactions. In practice, data lives in object storage (like S3, Azure Blob, or GCS) and is shared by all warehouses, while compute clusters are isolated and can scale independently. That combination captures both the shared-disk idea (a single data source accessible to all) and the shared-nothing idea (independent, scalable compute), so the statement is accurate.

It’s not a single-node setup, nor is it purely shared-disk or purely shared-nothing. Snowflake blends elements of both architectures to enable scalable, concurrent analytics.