Vendor training normally means a slide deck read aloud, a multiple choice quiz you can pass without paying attention, and a certificate that proves you clicked next. This is not that, and the difference comes down to one design decision, which is that the labs are graded automatically by a system that inspects your account to confirm you actually built the thing. You cannot watch your way through it. You have to create the warehouse, load the data, write the query and produce the result, and if you did not, the workshop knows.
That single mechanism does more for the quality of the learning than any amount of production value would. The content is sequenced sensibly. The introductory workshop covers the architecture, meaning the separation of storage from compute and what that separation buys you, then virtual warehouses and sizing, loading data from stages, semi structured data handling, and the features that people actually choose the platform for, including time travel and zero copy cloning. From there the tracks branch into data engineering, data sharing and collaboration, and application development.
Someone starting from a reasonable SQL background and no exposure to the platform can go from nothing to competent in a couple of weekends, which is a fair claim and not one most free training can make. It is genuinely free, including the compute. You work in a trial account with credits attached, and for the scale of the exercises that is sufficient. There is no card, no expiring paywall halfway through, and no upgrade prompt at the interesting part.
The badges are worth something in a way that most course completion certificates are not, and this is a narrow but real point. In job listings for this ecosystem, hiring managers know what these badges represent, partly because of the graded labs. They are not a substitute for experience, and they are a credible signal that you have used the product rather than read about it. The path towards the core certification is also well laid out, and completing the track gives you a realistic sense of whether you are ready to sit it.
Now the honest reservations. This is product training. You will learn how this platform does clustering and micro partitioning, and you will not learn what a columnar store is in general, how other systems solve the same problems, or why the architecture was designed this way rather than another way. Someone who learns data warehousing entirely through this route will know one system very well and will struggle to reason about the category.
If you want the underlying discipline, this needs to sit alongside something vendor neutral. The comparative silence is total. Competitors are not discussed, tradeoffs against them do not appear, and there is no acknowledgement that a different tool might suit your workload better. Expected, and worth stating plainly.
Cost is the biggest omission and it is not an accident. The single most common failure mode with this platform in real organisations is an unexpected bill, caused by a warehouse left running, an auto suspend setting nobody configured, a query someone scheduled every five minutes, or a badly designed transformation scanning far more than it needs to. Cost control is covered lightly and cheerfully in the training, and in production it is the thing that gets people hauled into meetings. The material would be considerably more valuable with a proper unit on what generates cost and how to observe it.
The trial credits can be a nuisance. Leave a warehouse running while you take a phone call, come back to a workshop you can no longer complete, and the recovery path is more annoying than it should be. And some of the production is showing its age. Slides and interfaces in the videos do not always match what you see on screen, which is a small thing and it does trip up beginners who cannot tell whether they have made a mistake or the video is old.
My four is for genuinely hands on free training with real verification, a sensible learning path and credentials that carry some weight in the relevant job market, held back by being entirely inward looking, by teaching a product rather than a discipline, and by treating cost management as a footnote when it is the thing that will actually cause you problems.