Snowflake Reviews

For Snowflake, we had four main use cases. The first use case was related to a data warehouse, and my banking client wanted to move his SQL Server database to Snowflake. All the source systems were also on Oracle and file-based systems, and the target data warehouse was SQL Server. From SQL Server, the client wanted to move to Snowflake. 

The second use case was related to a chat or messaging client. They were using EMR Hadoop as their data warehouse, but it was not performing, so we had to move the EMR Hadoop to Snowflake. 

The third use case was related to a ServiceNow compliance system, where ServiceNow was using SAP HANA for its reporting data warehouse, but it was too slow. It was not performing, and it was causing a lot of problems. We moved that ServiceNow compliance system from SAP HANA to Snowflake.

The fourth use case was related to a huge SQL Server database for a banking client. We moved the entire SQL database to Snowflake. 

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.

Portability is a big hurdle right now for our clients. Porting all of your existing SQL ecosystem, such as stored procedures, to Snowflake is a major pain point. Currently, Snowflake stored procedures use JavaScript, but they should support SQL-based stored procedures. It would be a huge advantage if you can write your stored procedures using SQL. 

It seems that they are working on this feature, and they are yet to release it. I remember seeing some notes saying that they were going to do that in the future, but the sooner this feature comes out, it would be better for Snowflake because there are a lot of clients with whom I'm interacting, and their main hurdle is to take their existing Oracle or SQL Server stored procedures and move them into Snowflake. For this, you need to learn JavaScript and how it works, which is not easy and becomes a little tricky. If it supports SQL-based procedures, then you can just cut-paste the SQL code, run it, and easily fix small issues. 

I have been using this solution for three years.

So far, with all four clients who have this solution, I have not seen any problem that stands out and causes major headaches or something like that.

Its scalability is really good. You can scale in both ways. You can actually scale up and down or scale out. Scaling up and down is done where we have an extra small warehouse, and we are moving to small, medium, large, or something like that. If you have a query that is running slow or a lot of data you are dealing with is slow, you can scale up. If you want to scale down from large to small, you can do that. 

If you want to get concurrency, scale-out architecture is available. I can actually do a cluster-based architecture where I can have two clusters, three clusters, or something like that. This way the concurrency can be improved.

In terms of the number of users, we have around 200 users.

They have a website where you have to go and raise your tickets. They resolve the ticket, and they are working fine. 

They don't actually entertain emails nowadays because the company has become big. I remember initially interacting with them through email. Now they don't do that. They clearly say not to send emails and go through the ticketing process, which makes sense. For a big company, it is not possible to track emails.

It is not complex. It is straightforward. It is a very simple database anyway. It is just having a script and running them. 

The only thing is that you have to go through the whole nine yards of getting an account or getting your single sign-on enabled. That is a part of every process. For any single sign-on application, you will have to go through this process. 

You also need to involve the right people, such as the security team, infrastructure team, and networking team. When they are there, the setup becomes easier, and there are no problems.

For its maintenance, we have only two or three people. We have one DBA and one account admin. There is another DBA who will take a rotation. You don't really need a big team to manage this because it is all cloud. Management is not that heavy.

Snowflake goes by credits. For a financial institution where you have 5,000 employees, monthly costs may run up to maybe $5,000 to $6,000. This is actually based on the usage. It is mostly the compute cost. Your computing cost is the variable that is actually based on your usage. It is pay-per-use. In a pay-per-use case, you won't be spending more than $6,000 to $7,000 a month. It is not more than that for a small or medium enterprise, and it may come down to $100K per year.

Storage is very standard, which is $23 a terabyte. It is not much for any enterprise. If you have even 20 terabytes, you are not spending more than $400 per month, which may turn out to be $2,000 to $3,000 per annum. 

When comparing it with SAP HANA, there is no one solution that fits all. Snowflake is useful if you have a SaaS-based product such as Salesforce, Workday, Anaplan, and Greenhouse. You can get the data from this type of SaaS-based system and ingest data.

SAP is born out of the entire ERP ecosystem. You have enterprise resource planning, and you have manufacturing, finance, and other systems. Big manufacturing industries usually implement ERPs because they want to do reporting, etc. SAP has this custom box stuff, and it is very difficult to get the data out of your SAP systems. So, you have to use SAP HANA. If you're not using the SAP systems, you don't really need SAP HANA. You are free to go for Snowflake. If you have an ERP system and you need to get the data out and move into an SAP or ERP system, and you want to have a data warehouse actually of ERP system, then SAP HANA makes more sense because it can natively talk to SAP. In such a case, you don't want to go for Snowflake. 

I would advise looking at your environment. Look at the workload and what you are trying to migrate. There is no one size fits all model. If you are a transaction system and you want to go with Snowflake, I would not advise this solution. If you are a reporting system and you want to migrate, Snowflake is the best choice. 

You also need to look at what kind of queries people are running. Don't assume that just because you are moving to Snowflake, you are going to cut down the cost by some factor. That is not going to happen. You need to really do a lot of homework and groundwork to know what kind of queries you're running and how can you avoid the compute costs. There is a lot of metadata available in Snowflake. You have to look at all that and then consciously try to improve the numbers. 

It is definitely a good tool and a good database without any adoption problems. Users who are SQL savvy can immediately adopt this solution. User onboarding is not really a huge exercise. It is a very simple exercise.

I would rate Snowflake an eight 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.

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

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.

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.

I have been using the solution for three years.

We have had no issues with the stability.

I give the scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is not complex.

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.

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.

I am using Snowflake for all our apps and data warehousing requirements.

The most valuable feature of Snowflake is it's an all-in-one data warehousing solution. 

Snowflake could improve migration. It should be made easier. It would be beneficial if it could offer some OLTP features. One of our customers was using Oracle for both data warehousing and OLTP workloads, and they were able to migrate their data warehousing workloads to Snowflake without major issues. However, for some of their OLTP requirements, such as needing a response time of fewer than 10 milliseconds for certain queries, Snowflake is currently unable to provide that.

It would be beneficial to see more integration and reporting tools embedded within the platform, similar to what Microsoft offers with its data warehouse and database solutions. Oracle, on the other hand, does not have such features. While Snowflake has a lot of options available on its marketplace, it would be helpful if it could provide more optimal options for users who are migrating from other environments. It would be great if they could follow the same path as Microsoft in this regard.

I have been using Snowflake for approximately one year.

Snowflake is stable.

We have two clients using this solution.

The solution is highly scalable.

We don't have direct support for Snowflake as we support our clients. If any support is required, our clients connect with Snowflake's support team and get the necessary assistance. They own the support account.

The initial setup of Snowflake is easy. We only need to create a login, there is no conventional setup.

When it comes to migrating from a previous platform to Snowflake, it largely depends on the size of the data warehouse, the number of integrations, the existing data pipelines, and the type of data sources. The complexity and size of the current deployment will determine how difficult the migration process will be.

The ROI appears good on paper, particularly in terms of cost reduction in operations. However, as companies have only been using Snowflake for a year and it's hard to say for sure. It looks promising for now, but it will take a year or so to see if it holds up in practice.

Snowflake is a cloud-based solution that uses a pay-as-you-go model. The storage and processing are separated, and you are mainly charged for the processing power you use. Additionally, there is a charge for storage, but the primary cost comes from the processing. You can choose different sizes of processing units, also known as warehouses, for your specific workload or requirements. You pay for the per-second utilization of those computing resources.

Snowflake is cost-effective. However, the cost can depend on how it's being used and how efficiently the code is written. If engineers don't write efficient code and usage is billed based on processing, it can become costly. If they write optimal code and choose the best solution, it can reduce costs in comparison to other options, such as Oracle.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Snowflake an eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the clone copy.

In a future release we would like to have a link which would allow us to connect to an external database and create certain views in your own database. This is because it is becoming hard for us to compare the data between multiple sources.

I have used this solution for two years.

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support of Snowflake is good. 

Positive

We have seen ROI when using Snowflake based on the insights we get.

I would recommend the SaaS version for their organization. It is not complicated to use. Establishing a private link with current cloud services has been challenging so I would recommend having some kind of a block.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

Snowflake is a real-time and cloud-based complete ETL tool. You can receive the beta from various sources from Amazon. You can run your reports and do analysis in  Snowflake. Informatica and Tableau should have done this. Snowflake is a modern version of Informatica which is 100 percent in the cloud.

Snowflake has a variety of other ETL provisions that they provide. You can use your own ETL pipeline. Additionally, they provide adapters, and they are always evolving, it is a well-developed solution.

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 have been using Snowflake for approximately eight months.

Snowflake is highly stable.

Snowflake is a cloud solution that provides great scalability. However, I am not sure if it is cost-effective.

We have approximately 30 engineers using this solution. We have plans to scale our usage in the future. This is going to be a futuristic solution.

We have not had any problems with the technical support.

The initial setup of Snowflake is straightforward. To set up the ETL pipeline, pull the data, and then generate the reports takes approximately two hours, end to end.

I did the implementation in-house. We have a three-member team that does the maintenance of Snowflake. However, the amount of people needed depends on the size of the pipeline.

Snowflake licensing is more flexible and it is cheaper than other solutions. I can use it for only 10 days for MVP, or three years, and for flexible models. I can scale up, or down, and the pricing is based on the volume and duration. There are many licensing permutation combinations available.

I rate Snowflake a nine out of ten.

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.