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Oracle Big Data Appliance vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Oracle Big Data Appliance is 1.4%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 14.4%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Hamad - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides clean, centralized data
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. Oracle could also improve Big Data Appliance by having one technology on their stack and working on it instead of continually changing the name or technologies or features. In addition, they could have a program to enable their partners to use this technology because right now, I have to have an expert to use the AI elements.
Snehasish Das - PeerSpot reviewer
Transformation in data querying speed with good migration capabilities
Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses. One key feature is the separation of compute and storage, which eliminates storage limitations. It also has tools for migrating data from legacy databases like Oracle. Its stability and efficiency enhance performance greatly. Tools in the AI/ML marketplace are readily available without needing development.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"This is a comprehensive solution that is easy to deploy."
"The best thing about the product is that the end-user can build the reports by themselves without really knowing anything about databases."
"The most valuable features of Snowflake are its performance and power."
"The integration capabilities of the product are good and you get what you pay for when it comes to Snowflake."
"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."
"I don't think it is difficult to maintain."
"The solution is easy to use."
"All the people who are working with Snowflake are extremely happy with it because it is designed from a data-warehousing point of view, not the other way around. You have a database and then you tweak it and then it becomes a data warehouse."
"The Time Travel feature is helpful for accessing historical data and the ability to clone external tables is useful."
"The most valuable feature has been the Snowflake data sharing and dynamic data masking."
 

Cons

"It seems like the deployment of repositories has become more difficult in later versions of the product rather than easier."
"The product should be simplified for the average user."
"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."
"From the documentation, the black box is not very descriptive. Snowflake does not reveal how exactly the data is processed or sourced."
"I would like to see more transparency in data processing, ATLs, and compute areas - which should give more comfort to the end users."
"The billing doubles with size increase, but processing does not necessarily speed up accordingly."
"Snowflake has to build more capabilities because they have only built very few adapters, but they're growing and they're building. They should provide provisions to collect ETL pipeline capabilities, reduce developer work, and make more rapid application development, rather than some customizations. There are very few options, but they are building. I hope they will build ETL rapid application development provisions with more variety."
"I am still in the learning stage. It has good security, but it can always be more secure."
"Every product has room for improvement, although in this case, it needs some broadening of the functionality."
"Improvement is needed in integrating external tools, such as data catalogs, which can be complicated due to differing formats and usage across departments."
"Room for improvement would be writebacks. It doesn't support extensively writing back to the database, and it doesn't support web applications effectively. Ultimately, it's a database call, so if we are building web applications using Snowflake, it isn't that effective because there is some turnaround time from the database."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Oracle's prices are too high compared to others in the market."
"We use Snowflake pretty heavily. We pay a significant amount of money for the tool. I'd say we pay $300k to $400K every year."
"Oracle is less expensive than Snowflake."
"The price of Snowflake is quite reasonable."
"The pricing is economical as compared to traditional solutions like Oracle and competitive pricing."
"You pay based on the data that you are storing in the data warehouse and there are no maintenance costs."
"It's expensive."
"The price for the solution's license depends on the use cases."
"Currently, we have a trial account, so we don't need a license. After our project starts, we would need a permanent license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
10%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
Educational Organization
19%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What do you like most about Snowflake?
The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
It is complicated to understand how requests impact warehouse size. Unlike competitors such as Microsoft and Databricks ( /products/databricks-reviews ), Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating ...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
There is a need for a tool to help me estimate the cost of using Snowflake. Enhancements in user experience for data observability and quality checks would be beneficial, as these tasks currently r...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing
 

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: May 2025.
858,327 professionals have used our research since 2012.