We performed a comparison between Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse and Snowflake based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable features are the performance and usability."
"The solution's integration is good."
"It has allowed fast daily loads and analysis of millions of rows of data, which eventually moved to near real-time."
"It handles high volumes of data very well."
"Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse provides good firewall processing in terms of response time."
"I like Data Warehouse's data integrity features. Data integrity is what databases are made for as opposed to spreadsheets."
"We can store the data in a data lake for a very low cost."
"It performs very well overall."
"It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."
"The solution's computing time is less."
"The solution speeds up the process of onboarding."
"They separate compute and storage. You can scale storage independently of the computer, or you can scale computing independently of storage. If you need to buy more computer parts you can add new virtual warehouses in Snowflake. Similarly, if you need more storage, you take more storage. It's most scalable in the database essentially; typically you don't have this scalability independence on-premises."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"The speed of data loading and being able to quickly create the environment are most valuable."
"The ETL and data ingestion capabilities are better in this solution as compared to SQL Server. SQL Server doesn't do much data ingestion, but Snowflake can do it quite conveniently."
"The solution's customer service is good."
"I would like the tool to support different operating systems."
"I think that the error messages need to be made more specific."
"The feature updates on the on-premise solution come very slowly, and it would be great if they came faster."
"It could be made more user-friendly for business users which would increase the user base."
"They need to incorporate a machine learning engine."
"In the future I would love to see a slightly better automation engine, just for the data integration layer, to make it slightly easier for end-users or junior developers to get involved in incremental updating."
"The only issue with the product is that the process is very slow when we have a huge amount of data."
"Some compatibility issues occur during deployment, so we need to build the product from scratch for some features."
"The price could be improved."
"The aspect of it that was more complicated was stored procedures. It does not support SQL language-based stored procedures. You have to write in JavaScript. If they supported SQL language and stored procedures, it would make migration from on-prem much simpler. In most cases, if an on-prem solution has stored procedures, they're usually written in SQL. They're not written as what most on-prem DBMS would refer to as an external stored procedure, which is what these feel like to most people because they're written in a language outside of SQL."
"If you go with one cloud provider, you can't switch."
"Their UiPath, the workspace area, needs some work."
"Every product has room for improvement, although in this case, it needs some broadening of the functionality."
"I would like to see a client version of the GUI."
"The solution needs more connectors."
"There are three things that came to my notice. I am not very sure whether they have already done it. The first one is very specific to the virtual data warehouse. Snowflake might want to offer industry-specific models for the data warehouse. Snowflake is a very strong product with credit. For a typical retail industry, such as the pharma industry, if it can get into the functional space as well, it will be a big shot in their arm. The second thing is related to the migration from other data warehouses to Snowflake. They can make the migration a little bit more seamless and easy. It should be compatible, well-structured, and well-governed. Many enterprises have huge impetus and urgency to move to Snowflake from their existing data warehouse, so, naturally, this is an area that is critical. The third thing is related to the capability of dealing with relational and dimensional structures. It is not that friendly with relational structures. Snowflake is more friendly with the dimensional structure or the data masks, which is characteristic of a Kimball model. It is very difficult to be savvy and friendly with both structures because these structures are different and address different kinds of needs. One is manipulation-heavy, and the other one is read-heavy or analysis-heavy. One is for heavy or frequent changes and amendments, and the other one is for frequent reads. One is flat, and the other one is distributed. There are fundamental differences between these two structures. If I were to consider Snowflake as a silver bullet, it should be equally savvy on both ends, which I don't think is the case. Maybe the product has grown and scaled up from where it was."
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Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is ranked 8th in Data Warehouse with 32 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 92 reviews. Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is rated 7.6, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse writes "An easy to setup tool that allows its users to write stored procedure, making it a scalable product". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Oracle Exadata, SAP BW4HANA and VMware Tanzu Greenplum, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and AWS Lake Formation. See our Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse vs. Snowflake report.
See our list of best Data Warehouse vendors and best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors.
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