Snowflake
Snowflake is simple to describe – it’s a “cloud-native analytical database”, but that really underestimates what it can do, how much power is available and at the same time how cost-effective it can be.
Snowflake is the perfect companion for Tableau and Alteryx (and also other tools) because it makes it easy to adjust the processing power to the amount of work that needs to get completed in a certain timeframe. But at the same time there’s the concept of “no DBA required” because the maintenance required to keep the database online and operational is quite low.
Snowflake charges “by the second” for usage. Some clients are worried about this when first starting out, but are usually pleasantly surprised when they see the actual monthly cost. To be clear, there are companies that spend “6 figures” on Snowflake per month, but there are also others that have very low monthly costs while not missing out on any functionality.