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Oracle Big Data Appliance vs Snowflake comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

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

Oracle Big Data Appliance
Ranking in Data Warehouse
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (6th), AI Software Development (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Oracle Big Data Appliance is 2.5%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 8.8%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Snowflake8.8%
Oracle Big Data Appliance2.5%
Other88.7%
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1031826 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analytics Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Platinum partnership leverages advanced storage and fosters seamless data integration
Areas of Oracle Big Data Appliance that can be improved include the pricing perspective because nowadays they have competition. We have so many technologies that have come to the market for less than even one-fourth or one-fifth of the Oracle price. For my side, the last time I worked with Oracle was in '21, '22. The price is a challenge that they have to look after. From the storage and data management perspective, I cannot recall anything that they have to improve, but they have to improve the visualization part significantly because they offer Oracle BI, which is an extremely not-matured application.
SunilPatil1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Asset Builder at Genpact - Headstrong
Have prioritized security while managing multi-agent data migration and cloud adoption
We utilize Time Travel with Snowflake because this is a very useful feature. Everyone finds it crucial because in conventional data platforms, it's very difficult to handle these kinds of things. This feature is essential, though I don't have the use cases currently; it is just there for implementation. Regarding Snowflake's automated scaling and suspension features, this auto-scaling is very significant. We had a comparison with Databricks and Snowflake a few months back, and this auto-scaling takes an edge within Snowflake; that's what our observation reflects.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Big Data responds to my needs."
"This is a comprehensive solution that is easy to deploy."
"The best feature of Oracle Big Data Appliance, from a price perspective for the storage, is because they have technology called the ZFS technology; it offers huge storage with a decent price."
"We could work on large unstructured datasets from different parts of the world on Facebook and Twitter to get better insights."
"The best thing about the product is that the end-user can build the reports by themselves without really knowing anything about databases."
"Because Big Data Appliance allows me to have a single source of truth, it means I have clean data that can be monetized and leveraged to gain more insights with real-time reports from the dashboard."
"The most valuable feature is that it can be used in conjunction with Spark memory processing, and our processing time has gone to 20 minutes from what used to be two or three hours on the mainframe."
"The most valuable aspect of Snowflake is its scalability."
"From a user's standpoint, it is a good product."
"There are a lot of good features, it's a very sophisticated, cutting edge technology and is super easy to use."
"The most valuable features are the clustering, LS50, being able to change the size, the pay per use feature, the flexibility with many different sources and analytic applications."
"Snowflake is easy for business users to implement, allowing them to start small and grow big."
"Once you have finished your designs they can be easily imported to Snowflake and the information can be readily accessed without an IT expert."
"The cloning functionality has been the most valuable. I have been able to completely copy databases. The data sharing concept is also useful. As compared to, for example, SAP, Snowflake is a lot more open, and it allows a lot more connectivity for other providers than an SAP ecosystem."
"Snowflake has been kind of a silver bullet; it has tried to marry the best of both worlds in terms of turnaround time, scalability, adoption, and seamlessness."
 

Cons

"It seems like the deployment of repositories has become more difficult in later versions of the product rather than easier."
"We need to display the results on our website. I think there is another product that joins with it to give you the possibility."
"We had to pursue several performance tuning measures to bring up the system to scale."
"From a technical perspective, Big Data Appliance could be improved with more innovation in the AI and machine-learning parts instead of relying on Cloudera."
"The product should be simplified for the average user."
"Areas of Oracle Big Data Appliance that can be improved include the pricing perspective because nowadays they have competition; we have so many technologies that have come to the market for less than even one-fourth or one-fifth of the Oracle price."
"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."
"It is difficult in some cases to perform ETL and this is something that should be included."
"I see room for improvement when it comes to credit performance. The other thing I'd like to be improved is the warehouse facility."
"I would like to see a client version of the GUI."
"Snowflake needs to improve its programming part. Though the tool has Snowpath, it doesn’t support all features like its competitor, Databricks. Snowflake doesn’t support external data ingestion capabilities. You need to have third-party tools for that. Also, the tool needs to incorporate data integration features in its future releases."
"The stability has been phenomenal up until lately. We haven't had any issues until the last month."
"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway."
"They need to incorporate some basic OLAP capabilities in the backend or at the database level. Currently, it is purely a database. They call it purely a data warehouse for the cloud. Currently, just like any database, we have to calculate all the KPIs in the front-end tools. The same KPIs again need to be calculated in Snowflake. It would be very helpful if they can include some OLAP features. This will bring efficiency because we will be able to create the KPIs within Snowflake itself and then publish them to multiple front-end tools. We won't have to recreate the same in each project. There should be the ability to automate raised queries, which is currently not possible. There should also be something for Exception Aggregation and things like that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Oracle's prices are too high compared to others in the market."
"The price for the solution's license depends on the use cases."
"Pricing is based on usage. It is the most expensive of our data tools."
"It is pay-as-you-go. Its cost is in the medium range."
"I have worked with multiple clouds, and cost-wise, it is a bit costlier than others, such as Redshift. Its price should be reduced."
"It is on a monthly basis. It is based on your usage. There are no additional costs from the point of the licensing fee. We do give some kind of evaluation to the customers about how much it is going to be. You can decide in Snowflake the virtual machine that you are using for customers. There are several kinds of virtual machines that you can use. It is similar to the clothing sizes: small to extra large. If you need more power in the coming month, you can decide in advance and take a more powerful machine. You can just select it from the platform. You can also decide which machine you want to take for extracting data."
"Part of the problem with the pricing is that it is very difficult for businesses to get an idea of how expensive it might be until they actually start using Snowflake."
"There is a license needed to use this solution. There are a few licensing options available. They have a pay-as-you-go option, but it is recommended to pay upfront."
"The pricing part is based on the computing and storage. The costs are different and then there are services costs as well."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise61
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Oracle Big Data Appliance?
Areas of Oracle Big Data Appliance that can be improved include the pricing perspective because nowadays they have competition. We have so many technologies that have come to the market for less th...
What is your primary use case for Oracle Big Data Appliance?
The typical use case for Oracle Big Data Appliance, which my clients use, is usually that the customer who has an Oracle application uses it because they can leverage the storage part. I don't need...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
We find the metering and billing experience for Snowflake to be expensive because there are many limitations to what it can do. When we compared performance-wise and cost-wise to Bedrock for some o...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Lessons learned about our main use case or how Snowflake performed in those areas include that the sales representatives do not really understand the product, and that the solutions consultants bas...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake?
Our main use case for Snowflake was to ingest data, use it for search, analytics, and data sharing with our customers; however, in reality, those use cases did not work. When it came to our challen...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Caixa Bank
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle Big Data Appliance vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.