Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides cloud-based object storage through a web service interface. You can use S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. S3 objects, which may be structured in any way, are stored in resources called buckets. One common use is to store files in comma-separated values (CSV) format, in which each record consists of multiple values separated by commas.

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse implemented as a managed service. It runs on the Amazon Web Services architecture using EC2 and S3 instances. Snowflake is designed to be fast, flexible, and easy to work with. For instance, for query processing, Snowflake creates virtual warehouses that run on separate compute clusters, so querying one virtual warehouse doesn't slow down the others.

AWS has both a REST API and command-line utilities that you can use to get at resources stored in the platform. To retrieve objects you need to know the object and host names, as well as your AWS authorization information.

If you don't already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you'll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in each table, you'll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them.

Depending on the structure of your data, you may need to prepare it for loading. Look at the supported data types for Snowflake and make sure that the data you've got will map neatly to them.

Note that you don't need to define a schema in advance when loading JSON data into Snowflake.

The Snowflake documentation's Data Loading Overview section can help you with the task of loading your data. If you're not loading a lot of data, you might be able to use the data loading wizard in the Snowflake web UI, but chances are the limitations on that tool will make it a non-starter as a reliable ETL solution. Alternatively, there are two main steps for getting data into Snowflake:

• Use the PUT command to stage files.
• Use the COPY INTO table command to load prepared data into an awaiting table.

You’ll have the option of copying from your local drive or from Amazon S3. One of Snowflake's slick features lets you make a virtual warehouse that can power the insertion process.

Snowflake is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, or Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax, or Panoply, which works with Redshift instances. Others choose a data lake, like Amazon S3 or Delta Lake on Databricks. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Panoply, To Azure Synapse Analytics, To S3, and To Delta Lake.