Snowflake Reviews

The primary use case is for building a database and data link.

I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with.

From the documentation, the black box is not very descriptive. Snowflake does not reveal how exactly the data is processed or sourced.

I have been using Snowflake for three years now.

The stability is reliable and a standard product.

The scalability is very good and we have around two hundred data sets currently operating.

Technical support is good. It is readily available and they are very responsive.

The initial setup was straightforward.

You can do the implementation in-house since it is a managed service and only takes a few hours.

The pricing is economical as compared to traditional solutions like Oracle and competitive pricing.

I would rate Snowflake a nine out of ten.

My company wanted to have all our data in one single place and this what we use Snowflake for. Snowflake also allows us to build connectors to different data sources. The ultimate goal is to provide reporting and analytics to all departments in the company.

This solution could be improved by offering machine learning apps. 

We have used this solution for one year. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

Before Snowflake, we used Azure.

I worked with a Microsoft partner to set up the entire thing. This took three months. 

We have not yet experienced ROI. 

Overall, this is a helpful tool with a friendly interface. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My current client is migrating from an on-premise data warehouse to the cloud, and they need to consolidate the data lake. I'm using Snowflake to develop the data lake and build data bots for certain functionalities. I've also used Snowflake to aggregate and clean data for my client's analytics.

I like Snowflake's data exchange capabilities. It can exchange data with downstream systems and other vendor partners as well.

There are some challenges with loading unstructured data and integrating some message queues or brokers. In one project, we had a problem connecting to one of the message queues and we had to take a different route altogether on Microsoft Azure. 

I started using this product about two years ago at my last company. Now, I'm a registered Snowflake partner, so working with Snowflake for one of my clients.

My clients haven't faced many stability challenges. It is a relatively new product that's still evolving. They're using it mainly for POCs, so they haven't faced any problems. 

The most valuable aspect of Snowflake is its scalability. The volume of data, which I have seen across almost in terms of five terabytes and other terabytes of data, I didn't see issues.

Snowflake technical support is good. At my previous company, they had a customer success officer for critical accounts, and they were accessible. When I registered as a partner, I also got a quick response from support. I would rate their support eight out of 10.

Positive

Setting up Snowflake isn't complex. I've not seen any challenges.

They have different pricing structures based on data usage. I think they have three or four tiers you can scale through. Most of the clients see an advantage from this type of licensing. That's the reason they go for it. It's priced competitively with other solutions.

I rate Snowflake eight out of 10. 

We're using Snowflake for Power BI Cloud. We had a cloud version of Snowflake, so we were connecting to the Snowflake database and importing required tables into our system, Power BI Desktop. From there, we linked those tables and created a semantic layer, an internal layer between the frontend and backend, and then we tuned the data. Then we used both the tables to tie into the dashboards that we developed. The dashboards show the sales information or marketing information.

It's a cloud solution.

I like the entire database. This is the advanced version of the cloud version, so it's really a flexible tool. If you have it implemented at home, you can access it from anywhere.

Sometimes when I'm trying to refresh the data, my different application or tool has to connect to its backend database through the connection I create. Sometimes, I face some issues like not having permissions. These aren't as crucial, but there are common errors sometimes where the database is down, or a table is nullified and a new table is added and you are not given access to that. With those errors, you don't have permissions.

I have been using Snowflake for a year.

It's stable.

The scalability is good. It handles a lot of data, and the processing speed is very high.

It's straightforward. You have to have a rule, database names, and a schema name.

When somebody deploys it and gives me the URL and the required tables to use, I use the URL and configure it from the frontend side, reporting side that could be more like Power BI or Tableau, and I start using it.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

We are silver or gold partners. The main use case is that we are building a data lake. We are creating a couple of downstream applications as well that will be used by data scientists. So, we will have a single data lake that will be used across the organization by different business domain users. The data is multi-source. We have data from SAP, JDE, and some Excel files.

The speed of data loading and being able to quickly create the environment are most valuable. 

For data, it provides built-in security and compliance with different standards, such as SOC 2, ISO, etc. So, we don't have to do a separate audit for compliance.

There are some gray areas. For example, there is no clarity on where the data sits exactly. That is their proprietary information, and they are not sharing those details. 

Its price should be improved. On the cost-side, it is more expensive than others.

If they could bring in some tools for data integration, it would be really great.

I have been using this solution for almost two and a half years.

It is pretty stable. Its stability is excellent.

It is scalable. As of now, there are 500 users, but slowly, we are planning to roll out to multiple regions. It is currently in Europe, and we will be rolling it out to the APAC and USA regions. By the year-end, there will be more than 1,000 users.

They're perfect. They're excellent. It could be because we are partners.

It is straightforward. It is not that complex.

Our own team deploys it for customers, but the initial configuration is done only by the Snowflake team because that is their area. 

I have worked with multiple clouds, and cost-wise, it is a bit costlier than others, such as Redshift. Its price should be reduced.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We use it as a traditional data warehousing application that we then set all of our reporting tools on top of.

We are able to consolidate multiple databases into one unified table for more complete reporting. That wasn't possible in our legacy tool that we were using because the query time was just too long. Now we're able to create this unified view of our entire organization and refresh it every 15 minutes; using the power of Snowflake's query is pretty much our biggest use case there.

The query speed, and the way that it actually executes its queries is the most valuable aspect of the solution. We had some queries that would take hours upon hours to run, and the Snowflake returns the results in about 15 minutes.

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.

One area for improvement would be the stored procedures. Currently, their stored procedures can only be executed at a transactional level versus being able to run and do updates and run things in a sequence.

An additional feature I'd like to see is called materialized views, which can speed up some run times. I'd like it to be able to be used where you can have multiple tables inside them; materialized view. That would be nice. As well as being able to run cursors, to be able to do some bulk updates and some more advanced querying, table building on the fly.

I've been using Snowflake for about four years now.

The stability has been phenomenal up until lately. We haven't had any issues until the last month. For the four years prior it was always on; we didn't have any outages. All in all the stability is great. The availability is extremely high. There's just been something in the last month that has caused outages for some periods of hours.

It's definitely scalable. We're on a very small usage compared to some of the other clients I know Snowflake has, so it's definitely scalable because we have tons of room to grow for our use.

Including myself, we currently have five users and they're data analysts.

I've only used their customer service in one or two instances, and they were very supportive and helpful. The tool is so user-friendly and straightforward that I've never really had to engage their professional services.

We didn't really have a traditional data warehouse application. We were just using Microsoft SQL Server, but we didn't actually have a traditional MPP-based data warehouse solution. We were still a very growing organization. As we continue to grow our business and increase in size, we have to get better tools that are meant to actually do what we're trying to do with other tools.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The permissioning is a little more complicated than it needs to be. It would be nice if it just assumed permissions when you create new tables or new users, but you do have to go and actually permission to everything for individuals and people rather than when you create something. It's just because there's no default role that applies to new stuff created so it's a little more complicated than it should be.

Our deployment took about one month. I'm the only one involved in the maintenance of the solution now.

We hired an ETL specialist to come in and get us set up, but he really didn't understand our business and what we were trying to accomplish. So everything he did, we pretty much paid for and then redid ourselves. But it was pretty straightforward using tools that are built for ETL processes. Understanding the SnowSQL command line tool to a certain degree also helps.

We don't really have it commercialized or revenue-generating in any way, but what we've seen with it is we've been able to remove all of our reporting and other data needs off of production application. So we're not putting extra stress on things that we need to always have up and running in order to operate the business. That's really our security. It's more of a favorite blanket if you will, is where we're seeing the benefits.

For our licensing, we renew every January by $25,000 in both credits.

Their pricing structure is a pay-per-second usage in terms of credits, but you can get discounts if you buy them in bulk. I think it's $1.10 an hour in terms of usage. We just buy upfront and that gets us taken care of for the whole year.

We did. I evaluated Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift.

In terms of distinguishing features between each of them, it was really just two things. One was the speed factor of query times. The other thing that really sold us on Snowflake was their ability for data sharing. They have a unique product as part of their solution that you can share information directly with other individuals, either in their own additional private cloud or if they're not Snowflake customers, simply sharing a URL link to where they can receive data themselves.

It's good to use every day. It's the backbone of our entire reporting platform for both internal and external deployments of reports and visibility. We plan on continuing to grow our usage with it, as we put more and more people into our reporting platforms and bring our customers into more self-service that's going to increase the usage of the tool by the way that it actually serves up the information to the BI platform.

It's not at this time a transactional sort of database solution. It's truly only meant for data warehousing or data laking, and there's a lot of different ways to do role-level security. So you've got to have a good plan on that, but if you're looking for it to be the backbone of a transactional application, it's not the right tool for that.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I use it for data warehousing. I just design databases, put data in there, and get data out.

Although I haven't used it much, it is very fast and the performance is great.

It has some technical quirks that whoever is using it needs to be aware of. It doesn't enforce typical relational database constraints. If you're not aware of that, you can really put some bad data in there.

I've been using it for about three months.

I would give it a ten out of ten. I haven't seen it failover.

I've never had any issues with it. It is being extensively used. We have between a hundred and a thousand users using Snowflake.

I have not had any experience with customer support, but I've heard it's good.

I've heard it's quite expensive.

I would give Snowflake a seven out of ten.

We use the product as a data warehouse.

The tool is very easy to use. The solution’s desktop features are also very easy to use. Also, the product’s SQL-based connectivity is also good. It can connect with any tool.

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.

I have been working with the solution for two years.

The solution is stable.

The product is scalable. You can scale the solution’s computation and storage features separately.

My company is a direct partner of the product. We have a lot of Snowflake experts who can resolve any doubts. Hence, I haven’t felt the need to contact customer service and support.

The solution’s setup is easy since it's a SaaS product. The tool’s deployment is fast and wouldn’t take more than two minutes.

Snowflake’s pricing is transparent. It is one of the cheapest cloud database warehouse providers. The tool follows a credit cost model. Everything on Snowflake is charged on the basis of credits. The credits depend on the cloud region and the public cloud provider that we use. Hence, the cost per credit will be different for AWS in Frankfurt and AWS in India. I think North Virginia is the cheapest region in terms of cost per credit. You will be consuming around 16 credits for large data warehouses.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. Snowflake is the market leader in data warehousing and cloud database. I don’t think that it has a direct competitor. I would suggest you give Snowflake a try if it fits your use case. You can open up a trial version for 45 days and convert it to a regular account. There are different tiers in the solution like business critical, standard, etc. The tool gets updates every week.