Snowflake Reviews

Name: Snowflake
Brand: Snowflake Computing
Rating: 4 (45 reviews)

Vendor: Snowflake Computing

4.2 out of 5

45 reviews

2,004 followers

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Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing solution for storing and processing data, generating reports and dashboards, and as a BI reporting source. It is used for optimizing costs and using financial data, as well as for migrating data from on-premises to the cloud.

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Featured reviews

MedhaValvekar

Sr Manager at Cognizant

May 12, 2022

The solution could use a little bit more UI. Something was in process, however, it's not yet deployed or in the version that I'm using it is not deployed. If we have to use any table or any schema in other DB features, the prompt comes over after a dot. Whenever we are using it it would really help if it looked better. If you're running a procedure, it just gives a standard error instead of the exact error captured. If you have to look at it, you need to go into the history to look into which query failed, and we need to figure it out. Instead, if the error, whatever it is, is instead displayed in the history, showing the point of failure, it would be more visible. It would save some time for all the people who are using it. There are some reporting analytics that we can use. I'm aware of those. However, if there was more reporting, we'd appreciate that. We'd like for it to become a complete one-stop-shop solution. We'd like to have some automation around small tasks, especially around scheduling.

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Chris Hastie

Data Lead at InterWorks

Apr 27, 2023

The main thing I'm excited to see at some point with Snowflake, hopefully - I've not seen anything coming out of it yet - is Git integration into the worksheets and the UI. Sometimes it can be tricky to manage multiple environments if you're purely using Snowflake as your scripting and pipeline environment. This is handleable, so if you use third-party tools like DBT, Matillion, etc., those can help. But if you're looking purely within Snowflake itself, it'd be great to have some form of Git support. For the future releases, I would love it if they one day decided to implement their own GUI-based transformation tool environment. I know that many competitors like Azure have to Sign Up, and Azure Data Factory can sit in. However, Azure is a very different beast that serves all sorts of different processes, and an argument could be made for whether it's the best to each of those or not. Specifically within Snowflake, I would love it if they could get some form of orchestration built-in for transformation that doesn't have to be controlled directly through code all the time.

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Anthony Fiorino

SVP, Head of Enterprise Data Mgmt & Data Intelligence at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nov 14, 2022

We weren't satisfied with our data warehouse, AWS Redshift, Oracle, and some on-prem elements such as a SQL Server. We wanted a cloud data warehouse that didn't require a lot of manual intervention and maintenance, DBAs and so on. We wanted a solution that could scale automatically and pay-as-you-go to cut down on wasteful infrastructure. Therefore, Snowflake made a lot of sense, plus compared to Redshift at the time, the separation of storage and computing was huge. That was an essential differentiator for us. We previously used ThoughtSpot, specifically their Falcon engine, their appliance version, and it did everything on its own. We brought in Snowflake later when ThoughtSpot introduced their product called Embrace. We were among the earliest adopters to switch, and six to eight months after, we integrated with Snowflake.

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Pricing

"Pricing can be confusing for customers."
"The whole licensing system is based on credit points. You can also make a license agreement with the company so that you buy credit points and then you use them. What you do not use in one year can be carried over to the next year."
"You pay based on the data that you are storing in the data warehouse and there are no maintenance costs."

Valuable Features

"The distributed architecture of Snowflake has the capacity to process huge datasets faster and allows us to scale up and down according to our needs."
"As long as you don't need to worry about the storage or cost, this solution would be one of the best ones on the market for scalability purposes."
"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."

Room For Improvement

"Snowflake has to improve their spatial parts since it doesn't have much in terms of geo-spatial queries."
"There are some stored procedures that we've had trouble with. The solution also needs to fine-tune the connectors to be able to connect into the system source."
"Support needs improvement, as it can take several days before you get some initial support."

Pricing

"Pricing can be confusing for customers."
"The whole licensing system is based on credit points. You can also make a license agreement with the company so that you buy credit points and then you use them. What you do not use in one year can be carried over to the next year."
"You pay based on the data that you are storing in the data warehouse and there are no maintenance costs."

Valuable Features

"The distributed architecture of Snowflake has the capacity to process huge datasets faster and allows us to scale up and down according to our needs."
"As long as you don't need to worry about the storage or cost, this solution would be one of the best ones on the market for scalability purposes."
"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."

Room For Improvement

"Snowflake has to improve their spatial parts since it doesn't have much in terms of geo-spatial queries."
"There are some stored procedures that we've had trouble with. The solution also needs to fine-tune the connectors to be able to connect into the system source."
"Support needs improvement, as it can take several days before you get some initial support."

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our Snowflake Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Learn more about Snowflake

The solution is often used as a centralized data warehouse, combining data from multiple sources. Snowflake has helped organizations improve query performance, store and process JSON and XML, consolidate multiple databases into one unified table, power company-wide dashboards, increase productivity, reduce processing time, and have easy maintenance with good technical support.

Its platform is made up of three components:

Cloud services: As part of its cloud services, Snowflake uses ANSI SQL, which empowers users to optimize their data and manage their infrastructure, while Snowflake handles the security and encryption of stored data.

Query processing: With Snowflake, workload concurrency is never a problem because its compute layer is made up of virtual cloud data warehouses that let you analyze data through requests. Each of the warehouses do not compete for computing resources nor do they affect the performance of each other.

Database storage: Snowflake manages all parts of the data storage process automatically, including file size, compression, organization, structure, and metadata, as well as statistics.

Snowflake Features

Snowflake has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Scalability: Snowflake architecture provides nearly unlimited scalability and high speed because it uses a single elastic performance engine. The solution also supports an unlimited amount of concurrent users and workloads, from interactive to batch.

Automation: Snowflake makes automation easy and enables enterprises to automate data management, security, governance, availability, and data resiliency.

Seamless cross-cloud and cross-region connections: With seamless cross-cloud and cross-region connections, Snowflake eliminates ETL and data silos. Anyone who needs access to shared secure data can get a single copy via the data cloud. In addition, Snowflake makes remote collaboration and decision-making fast and easy via a single shared data source.

Third-party data integrations: Snowflake’s Data Marketplace offers third-party data which allows you to connect with Snowflake customers to extend workflows with data services and third-party applications.

Snowflake Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Snowflake. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Helps optimize costs

Reduces downtime

Improves operational efficiency

Built for high reliability and availability

Automates data replication for fast recovery

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Snowflake solution.

Sreenivasan R., Director of Data Architecture and Engineering at Decision Minds, says, "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."

A director of business operations at a logistics company mentions, "It requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well."

A Solution Architect at a wholesaler/distributor comments, "The ability to share the data and the ability to scale up and down easily are the most valuable features. The concept of data sharing and data plumbing made it very easy to provide and share data. The ability to refresh your Dev or QA just by doing a clone is also valuable. It has the dynamic scale up and scale down feature. Development and deployment are much easier as compared to other platforms where you have to go through a lot of stuff. With a tool like DBT, you can do modeling and transformation within a single tool and deploy to Snowflake. It provides continuous deployment and continuous integration abilities. There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only get charged for your usage. You only pay for what you use. When we share the data downstream with business partners, we can specifically create compute for them, and we can charge back the business."

Snowflake was previously known as Snowflake Computing.

Snowflake is the #1 ranked solution in top Data Warehouse tools and top Cloud Data Warehouse tools. PeerSpot users give Snowflake an average rating of 8.4 out of 10. Snowflake is most commonly compared to BigQuery: Snowflake vs BigQuery. Snowflake is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 54% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a educational organization, accounting for 24% of all views.