We performed a comparison between Snowflake and Vertica based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Vertica has an edge in this comparison due to its excellent performance. Snowflake does come out on top in the Ease of Deployment category, however.
"Data sharing is a good feature. It is a majorly used feature. The elastic compute is another big feature. Separating compute and storage gives you flexibility. It doesn't require much DBA involvement because it doesn't need any performance tuning. We are not really doing any performance tuning, and the entire burden of performance tuning and SQL tuning is on Snowflake. Its usability is very good. I don't need to ramp up any user, and its onboarding is easier. You just onboard the user, and you are done with it. There are simple SQL and UI, and people are able to use this solution easily. Ease of use is a big thing in Snowflake."
"The most efficient way for real-time dashboards or analytical business intelligence reports to be sent to the customer."
"It is a very well-distributed system. It has different data engines for different applications. Many applications can use different computational engines at the same time. In terms of data processing, the feeling was similar to working with a relational database but in a scalable way."
"A user-friendly and reliable solution."
"Very easy to use and easy to query."
"The feature that is really striking is the ability to translate the SQL workloads into the NoSQL version that can be used by Snowflake."
"This solution has helped our organization by being easy to maintain and having good technical support."
"Snowflake is scalable both in terms of the amount of data that you can run through it and the number of users that engage with it."
"The solution is quick, has good compression data, and is not expensive."
"The hardware usage and speed has been the most valuable feature of this solution. It is very fast and has saved us a lot of money."
"Speed and resiliency are probably the best parts of this product."
"I don't need any special hardware. I can use commodity hardware, which is nice to have in a commercial solution."
"Vertica's most outstanding features are the compression rates achieved and the speed of access of high volume data."
"Vertica enabled us to close large deals. Customers with large data sets had to be migrated from PostgreSQL to Vertica due to performance."
"I like the projection feature, which increases query performance."
"The solution has great capabilities. The tool that instructs the internal database forward is easy to use and is very powerful."
"I have heard people having difficulty with the machine learning model, so there may be room for improvement."
"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."
"I am still in the learning stage. It has good security, but it can always be more secure."
"The solution could use a little bit more UI."
"Snowflake can improve its machine learning and AI capabilities."
"We would like to have an on-premises deployment option that has the same features, including scalability."
"They should improve the reporting tools."
"The pricing of the solution should be much easier to calculate or find by yourself."
"Vertica can improve automation and documentation. Additionally, the solution can be simplified."
"Performance of management of metadata layer (database catalog) needs improvement. We still have to have smaller customers on PostgreSQL; Vertica cannot manage thousands of schemata."
"I have found that coding support could be simplified."
"Fact-to-fact joins on multi-billion record tables perform poorly."
"The integration of this solution with ODI could be improved."
"The integration with AI has room for improvement."
"The biggest problem is the cost of cloud deployment."
"There are a lot of limitations within this product and it makes things extremely hard for developers. It lacks Stored Procedure, packages, and triggers like other RDBMs."
Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 92 reviews while Vertica is ranked 6th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 82 reviews. Snowflake is rated 8.4, while Vertica is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Vertica writes " A user-friendly tool that needs to improve its documentation part". Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, AWS Lake Formation and Amazon EMR, whereas Vertica is most compared with SQL Server, Amazon Redshift, Teradata, Oracle Exadata and BigQuery. See our Snowflake vs. Vertica report.
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