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Firebolt vs Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Firebolt
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (17th)
Microsoft Parallel Data War...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

Iqbal Hossain Raju - PeerSpot reviewer
Junior Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Can quickly query it to generate quick results
We have used Snowflake before. We support both. Firebolt has better performance, executing queries much quicker than Snowflake. However, Snowflake has more functionality. Depending on the client's needs, we can recommend the best option. Firebolt is a relatively new technology. Snowflake has many functionalities. Firebolt does not support unloading data to S3. There is no built-in way to do this in Firebolt. Alternatively, the data can be retrieved using API calls and loaded to S3 manually. Data can be unloaded to S3 directly using Snowflake. Firebolt significantly improves our performance over Snowflake because it takes less time to execute queries. This is especially important for our company because we use some KPIs that require fast loading times.
HassanFatemi - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at Smart Data-Driven Solutions
Has handled large volumes of data effectively but still needs cost flexibility
There could be improvements on the cost side of Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse because it is still considered to be quite expensive by a lot of users, and many companies are not interested in solutions with parallel data warehousing due to this expense. Addressing the cost would be the number one area for improvement. Additionally, I have not worked recently with it, so I don't know if this feature already exists, but if it doesn't, having an elastic feature that adjusts the service's power dynamically based on the workload would be beneficial instead of fixing the power at a specific level.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results."
"The biggest advantage of Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is the possibility to stop or pause the service because it can be very expensive, and the ability to pause the service when I don't use it is probably the main feature, along with the possibility to handle huge amounts of data, which is quite an interesting capability of the service."
"Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse integrates beautifully with other Microsoft ecosystem products."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."
"The stability and ease of use of Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse are valuable features."
"Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse provides significant performance boost from 10-100 X times faster for data loading operation."
"SQL Data Warehouse provides our organization with a way to access all corporate data in a uniform way."
"​It has allowed fast daily loads and analysis of millions of rows of data, which eventually moved to near real-time.​"
"One of the most important features is the ease of using MS SQL, as it is very easy to pull the data from it and also very easy to import data from CSV or Excel."
 

Cons

"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
"The patch releases are a concern. For a customer with tons of servers, frequent patches lead to required reboots, which interrupts business."
"The product scalability needs improvement."
"It could offer more development across the solution."
"Some compatibility issues occur during deployment, so we need to build the product from scratch for some features."
"The reporting for certain types of data needs to be improved."
"I would like to see better visualization features."
"We'd like to see it be a bit more compatible with other solutions."
"The only issue with the product is that the process is very slow when we have a huge amount of data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"They offer an annual subscription. The pricing depends on the size of the environments."
"I think the program is well-priced compared to the other offerings that are out in the market."
"All the features that we use do not require any additional subscription or yearly fees."
"Microsoft has an agreement with the government in our country, so our customers get their licensing costs from the Ministry. Whenever we work with any government, company, or government institute, which is mainly what we are doing, that license comes directly from the Ministry of Technology and Information."
"Technical support is an additional fee and is expensive."
"The solution's pricing is fairly decent for organizations with huge data sizes."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"The tool could be expensive if we need to manage a lot of data."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Construction Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise22
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What needs improvement with Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse?
The pricing could be better; I think it actually just went up.
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse?
The basic use case for us is virtual machines. In real estate, we use it for our operations. They handle large data sets well, and the performance is good during those times.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft PDW, SQL Server Data Warehouse, Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse, MS Parallel Data Warehouse
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Auckland Transport, Erste Bank Group, Urban Software Institute, NJVC, Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, Tata Steel Europe
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