Associate Data Engineer at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees
MSP
Top 5
Cheapest tool available in the market for data warehousing
Pros and Cons
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

We use the product as a data warehouse.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with the solution for two years.

Buyer's Guide
Snowflake
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Snowflake. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Data Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Easy to migrate to, easy to use, and easy to set up
Pros and Cons
  • "It was relatively easy to use, and it was easy for people to convert to it."
  • "The aspect of it that was more complicated was stored procedures. It does not support SQL language-based stored procedures. You have to write in JavaScript. If they supported SQL language and stored procedures, it would make migration from on-prem much simpler. In most cases, if an on-prem solution has stored procedures, they're usually written in SQL. They're not written as what most on-prem DBMS would refer to as an external stored procedure, which is what these feel like to most people because they're written in a language outside of SQL."

What is our primary use case?

I have been working on Redshift, Snowflake, and AWS RDS Oracle. In the particular case of RDS Oracle, they were migrating from on-prem Solaris equipment to cloud-based RDS.

I would suggest Snowflake for anyone with the need for a reporting/business analytics view of their data that wants only wishes to maintain technical FTE's around processing the data into or out of a data repository but, doesn't want to go to extent of technical management of "AWS clusters" for the data repository.

What is most valuable?

It was relatively easy to use, and it was easy for people to convert to it. Moved 168 tables and appropriate indices to Snowflake with minimum modification to Current Oracle DDL. The largest degree of change was setting up the corresponding access Hierarchy to duplicate what was in Oracle ( customer had separate permission structures for application vs Admin/support vs direct reporting access to the data).

What needs improvement?

The aspect of it that was more complicated was stored procedures. It does not support SQL language-based stored procedures. You have to write in JavaScript. If they supported SQL language and stored procedures, it would make migration from on-prem much simpler. In most cases, if an on-prem solution has stored procedures, they're usually written in SQL. They're not written as what most on-prem DBMS would refer to as an external stored procedure, which is what these feel like to most people because they're written in a language outside of SQL.

The other thing that people found difficult to deal with was that they had several Oracle DBAs who were very experienced DBAs, but they were used to on-prem. They were used to having the ability to turn any dial and flip any switch. Moving to Snowflake did cause some issues there because they had to completely readdress the fact that they couldn't touch the engine, and they had to spend more time analyzing performance.

For how long have I used the solution?

I probably used it about six months ago. I haven't been working with a client who is currently on this platform.

How are customer service and support?

I haven't had to call on them for a problem at that level.

How was the initial setup?

It was a cakewalk. The biggest thing that's hard to do with it is that you have to do an analysis of performance over time to determine the scale because they separate compute and storage.

Scaling the query to a proper size compute is the larger aspect of the problem for most people. That's because you're looking at something completely different. The problem is that you're now trying to figure out what is the largest compute you need to keep performance where you want it without going too large. If you were in an on-prem scenario, you would tweak and twaddle all the dials. You might rewrite the query, but at the end of the day, you're still working inside the same physical acquisition or same physical resources, whereas in Snowflake, you're literally saying that you've got a 10 million row table as part of your query, but what is the necessary compute facility that you need to run queries that are running against that table.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is hard to say because we're usually engaged in the transition as opposed to the long term. Their storage costs are easily within pennies of what AWS S3 would normally cost. 

Most of the clients I've been working with are in the financial sector, and they're relatively small. I would put them in an SMB connection. The first thing we have to bring up for people is that they're going to build this. They shouldn't store their data in S3. They should pipeline directly into Snowflake and use it on their storage. So, the cost is a big issue because these are small to medium size companies, and that is the biggest thing we had to price point for them.

What other advice do I have?

The biggest conversion problem we've seen so far is when someone had a large number of stored procedures that were SQL-based, as opposed to external stored procedures written in C or whatever the DBMS would support. Converting those stored procedures either to a SQL script or to a stored procedure or function that's based on JavaScript is the biggest challenge that most people we've dealt with are having. That's because they have to relearn the language they're writing their logic in.

I would easily rate it an eight out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Snowflake
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Snowflake. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Senior Data Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
The most efficient way for analytical intelligence reports to be sent to a customer
Pros and Cons
  • "The most efficient way for real-time dashboards or analytical business intelligence reports to be sent to the customer."
  • "Their UiPath, the workspace area, needs some work."

What is our primary use case?

I use this solution for actively building out the cloud data warehouse and data platform for enterprise level customers as well as startups. Generally, our clients are looking for a data warehouse on the cloud to enable them to scale infinitely at a lower cost. I've worked for a finance analytical team building their data lake, the data platform on top of Snowflake, as well as for a telehealth team. It's basically about getting data from multiple sources and building out an entire data platform with data governance. We are customers of Snowflake. 

How has it helped my organization?

One small company I worked with had a MySQL RTS based instance and were using AWS RDS with MySQL on top of that. As a result they were unable to scale their database because there were around half a million queries being run per second as well as data querying and data updating. The migration to Snowflake helped the company because there are no limitations in the cloud and no longer restrictions on the queries. Performance for end users improved whether they were internal or external clients. They used to sell the data through APIs so this migration helped to grow their business overall as well as the ML team efficiency and the productivity of users who previously used the data platform. 

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of Snowflake is the query performance. Snowflake is the most efficient way for real-time dashboards or analytical business intelligence reports to be sent to the customer. There are a couple of areas where they have recently improved. One of the key features they introduced is an internal, table-based merch as well as storing of the unstructured data. You can now build a table out of unstructured data, metadata. This hasn't yet been officially announced.

What needs improvement?

Although the UI has improved lately, they still need to work on their UiPath, the workspace area.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for two years. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's an infinitely scalable system, but if you use terabytes or petabytes of data, then you need to tune the levels. Each day, we get four to five gigs and overall, our data warehouse has 100 gigs plus, it's huge data. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Our clients previously used the RTS based MySQL and migrated to Snowflake from there. The primary reasons they moved was because of scalability and performance. Other than that, Snowflake reduces costs quite significantly. I also have experience with BigQuery which is particularly used for Google Cloud although these days they have a multicloud enrollment. Snowflake is vendor independent so you don't have to stick everything in Google Cloud. In terms of performance, Snowflake is faster than BigQuery. 

How was the initial setup?

The advantage of Snowflake is that it's easy to deploy and they take care of the setup. Basically, it's a cloud warehouse and doesn't need to be registered on any website. It's easy. It just requires dedicating space and registering. It shouldn't take more than a couple of days. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Snowflake is reasonably priced, close to half the cost of some other solutions. 

What other advice do I have?

In terms of performance the solution is good when compared to the analytical workloads and good in comparison to Redshift or BigQuery. The performance is on a slightly higher level, but when it comes to real-time performance, NoSQL is better than Snowflake, but that's in rare cases and depends on the particular requirement. Overall, for the analytical use case, Snowflake is a good solution and in terms of availability, it's a cloud data warehouse, so  they do replication and the like. 

It's important to understand your business needs, because these tools need to be properly modeled and they have their own advantages. If you're new to Snowflake, it's worth starting slowly for one month and move gradually, because if it's a complex system and you move everything to Snowflake without good architecture, then you can get stuck with the original problem. It's worth taking the time to make it efficient and then design modeling; there are SnowPro certifications as well. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user1251369 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal IT Technologist- BI Platform Architect at Medtronic
Real User
Good snapshot and rollback features and has good scaling options
Pros and Cons
  • "The snapshot feature is good, the rollback feature is good and the interface is user-friendly."
  • "Availability is a problem."

What is our primary use case?

We use this product basically for developing an IoT (Internet of Things). Currently, we are sending data from our S3 (Simple Storage Service) storage. In the future, we are planning to directly stream data to Snowflake.

What is most valuable?

In terms of features, we have not yet explored the product completely. So we are still in the proof of concept phase. As of now, the product meets our preliminary requirements. The snapshot feature is good and the rollback feature is good. That is why we have the product and these are the key things we need.

What needs improvement?

The recovery process is very simple and very user-friendly as well. The constraint files could be improved. But the most important things are there. Also, the interface is good to work with and user-friendly.

If I had to say what needs improvement, in my experience is that the availability is a problem. Availability should be high and has to be enhanced.

I still have not explored all of the existing features. Because I have not been deeply involved with using the program it is hard to say what else is missing or what I would need.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have just explored the product for a few months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of Snowflake is very good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is very good and very simple.

Within the company, we currently have a total of fewer than 50 people using the product. Their general roles vary from data analyst to data scientist, to IT professionals, and maybe one or two of the upper managers.

How are customer service and technical support?

I tried using technical support once and they were very helpful. But after that, I have not had any reason to explore the support services.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was simple.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was done by the vendor.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing to work with Snowflake we looked at virtual solutions and we looked at Redshift, we looked at Qubole and a couple of other cloud options. Earlier when we did a mining site, I was working with Alteryx, so I was already familiar with that product and its capabilities to use for comparison. We decided to go with Snowflake because it seemed mature and had what we wanted.

What other advice do I have?

My advice to someone who is looking at Snowflake is that if they are looking at analytics tools in addition to warehousing and certain advantages of cloud computing, then I would suggest Snowflake. But if they are just looking for the warehousing part where you will later just use another solution on top of it, then I would not suggest Snowflake.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Snowflake as an eight or nine. Let's say 8.5.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Sunny Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Specialist Programmer at Infosys
MSP
Top 5
Simple setup, reliable, and high performance
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature of Snowflake is its performance. We can access the data quickly. Additionally, it handles structured and non-structured data."
  • "The solution could improve by allowing non-structured data, such as PDFs, images, or videos. We cannot see the data."

What is our primary use case?

I am using Snowflake for migrating data and table backups.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of Snowflake is its performance. We can access the data quickly. Additionally, it handles structured and non-structured data.

What needs improvement?

The solution could improve by allowing non-structured data, such as PDFs, images, or videos. We cannot see the data.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Snowflake for approximately three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of Snowflake is good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Snowflake is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 200 to 300 people using the solution.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Snowflake is easy.

What other advice do I have?

If the use case fits the solution then I would recommend it. For example, if you have large data and want the rational database backed up, this solution would be a good choice.

I rate Snowflake an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
CEO at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Real User
A cloud computing-based data warehousing solution with a valuable feature called Snowpipe
Pros and Cons
  • "Snowflake is an enormously useful platform. The Snowpipe feature is valuable because it allows us to load terabytes and petabytes of data into the data mart at a very low cost."
  • "It would be better if they had a data profile tool that tells me where the gaps are in my time series data."

What is our primary use case?

We have a data mart, and we are using it to share data with big enterprise customers with major security requirements.

What is most valuable?

Snowflake is an enormously useful platform. The Snowpipe feature is valuable because it allows us to load terabytes and petabytes of data into the data mart at a very low cost. Then we just share it out, and all the compute expenses are charged directly to our clients.

What needs improvement?

It would be better if they had a data profile tool that tells me where the gaps are in my time series data. We are anxiously waiting for them to release their data catalog and analytics capabilities, which is going to happen in June or July. If that works the way we think it might, then that would just extend our firm's capabilities into a space that we have never been interested in building ourselves. It could be a really good thing for us.

For how long have I used the solution?

We started using Snowflake this year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There's never any outage, and it's cross-cloud. The stability is not even a good question for that platform. It makes no sense to us.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Snowflake is scalable. It does cost more money, but it's some kind of magic they're doing behind the scenes that you don't have to think about. It's brilliant, and it's going to take over completely.

How are customer service and technical support?

Their tech support is good. Their sales team is very technical, and they're able to speak to our engineers and walk them through what we need to do. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

About three years ago, Databricks was sort of the hot thing among our clients, and everyone was using it for low-code analytics. We had to deliver data in a format that was specific to Databricks. Databricks had this massive growth, use, and adoption. They have a very good footprint now, but we see those same clients shifting their data to Snowflake, and pretty much nobody asks for Databricks anymore.

I think there's this big war sort of brewing between Databricks and snowflake. Snowflake is going to come out with the analytics capability that Databricks has. They're working furiously to get it released. I don't know what it's going to look like, but they're going head-to-head with Databricks. I think Snowflake is going to crush them.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

In the beginning, we didn't know what we were doing, and we racked up huge compute costs, shockingly and quickly. But the sales team was extremely helpful and showed us where we were doing everything wrong, and they explained to us how best to use their platform. We have massively funded data engineering teams, but now our use has plummeted to almost free.

Because of the caliber of our customers at the time, we had to sign on to the enterprise subscription tier. We're a startup, and we didn't know it at the time, but the cost per credit for the enterprise tier was almost double. 

The cost per credit, that's where you get all this unlimited autoscale that you don't even have to think about. We don't really need any of that because they already provide all the redundancy, backup, failover, and all of that stuff. We scaled down and cut all of our costs almost in half by getting rid of that scalability capability because we don't need that.

They give a different price for every single company. I don't know if I negotiated that well, but we got the enterprise tier for $3 a credit, and the other two were a dollar-ninety a credit. I suspect we don't have almost zero compute usage, but I know that our annual contract packages are below all of their minimums.

What other advice do I have?

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Snowflake an eight.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
General Manager at itcinfotech
MSP
Great interface tool which is really useful for our computation and storage needs
Pros and Cons
  • "Can be leveraged with respect to better performance, auto tuning and competition."
  • "Pricing is an issue for many customers."

What is our primary use case?

We work with multiple customers who were asking for this and other similar solutions. We've since had several team members certified in Snowflake and we have a certified team working with that solution and keeping up to date with developments. I'm the general manager of the company and we are implementers. 

What is most valuable?

Snowflake has its own features in comparison to other similar solutions like Exadata. This gives it huge competitive power. It has a very good interface tool with its own benefits and features which are really useful for our needs from a computation and storage perspective. I think this solution provides the best potential of any data warehousing product where they choose to use Snowflake instead of Oracle or DBII. The product can be leveraged with respect to better performance, auto tuning, competition and performance. From an architectural perspective, the solution has all the ingredients it requires. 

What needs improvement?

We've come to realize that for many customers, pricing of this solution is an issue. Maintaining Snowflake clusters is challenging and cost intensive. Reporting could also be improved. Any data that moves out of Snowflake is being cached. If I have 400 to 500 end users, with 100 or 200 reports on a daily basis, all the reports will be cached. It's a matter of ensuring that costs can be optimized. The combination of Red Warescape plus Snowflake is a combination from the design and development perspective. But the combination from the reporting perspective to micro strategy on top of Snowflake could be a better feature, so there's a combination that has to be considered.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for about 10 months. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Our customers tell us that it is a stable solution. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We're working in 32 countries with enterprise size customers. We're still waiting to see what happens with that level of scalability and how the solution performs. If this product can be further fine-tuned or optimized in such a way that it becomes a very good fit for the Azure platform, that would be great. 

How are customer service and technical support?

They provide very good documentation on implementation design and development perspectives. 

How was the initial setup?

I think the initial setup is straightforward. Anyone who has worked on these types of solutions will pick it up quickly.

What other advice do I have?

It really depends on the nature of the implementation. If it's a small or medium sized company, we focus more on the pricing. If that can be brought down, I think Snowflake has a high potential that it can meet and can create a big name for itself in the big data cloud implementation platform. It has all the features. It already has all the complementary features to deal with the challenges. Those are built in and taken care of. It could be on Google cloud, or it could be on Azure or it could be on Amazon.

I'll rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Implementer
PeerSpot user
Principal Director at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Easy to use, stable, and scalable
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution is easy to use."
  • "The price could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution to migrate data from old legacy ERP systems into Snowflake which reduces our work by 70 percent.

What is most valuable?

The solution is easy to use. We have third-party integrations, which make it easy to migrate from our landing to our warehouse. Inside Snowflake, we can convert what we create, unlike other hyperscalers.

What needs improvement?

The price could be improved. The more data we consume, the higher the cost becomes. Our licensing will also increase. How can we use our licensing system effectively? We have expertise and experience in different implementations, and we have control of our licensing. Therefore, there is an accelerator that allows us to control these effective methods of licensing.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have had no issues with the stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I give the scalability an eight out of ten.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is not complex.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution is costly, making it unsuitable for midsize organizations due to its price.

I give the cost of the solution a seven out of ten.

What other advice do I have?

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

For organizations that do not wish to be confined to one type of hyperscalar, such as VM Azure, I recommend Snowflake as it provides greater flexibility.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Snowflake Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Snowflake Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.