Step 1: Choose a Data Warehouse
Your data stack starts here. Every pipeline, transformation, and dashboard feeds into a warehouse. Getting this decision wrong costs you a painful migration 18 months later. Getting it right means the rest of your stack falls into place. The three serious options for startups are Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift. Databricks is worth knowing about but overkill until you have a data engineering team. The three options Snowflake Snowflake is the default for a reason. It works with any cloud, separates compute from storage (so you only pay for queries when they run), and has the broadest connector and tool support in the ecosystem. dbt, Fivetran, Airbyte, Looker, Tableau — everything integrates with Snowflake first. ...