Snowflake Reviews

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.

I am a solutions architect for Snowflake.

The Time Travel feature is helpful for accessing historical data and the ability to clone external tables is useful.

I would like to see more transparency in data processing, ATLs, and compute areas - which should give more comfort to the end-users. 

Improvement to the end-to-end process of loading data into Snowflake could be made as well.

The product is stable so far.

The product is scalable enough.

The initial setup is not complex.

I believe that pricing is reasonable for this solution.

Snowflake is easy for business users to implement, allowing them to start small and grow big.

I think people are still debating on whether they should still continue with S3 and add Snowflake or, whether they should take away S3 and completely rely on Snowflake.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Snowflake for data warehouse modeling and reports.

Once you have finished your designs they can be easily imported to Snowflake and the information can be readily accessed without an IT expert.

The documentation could improve. They should provide architecture information.

There could be better integration with tools other than the common databases used to receive data. There are other tools that have ETL tools within, such as Tableau. You are able to work with information prior to sending it to Tableau. This feature would be nice to have in a tool from Snowflake.

In a future release, they should make it easier to do reporting. A drag and drop type feature would be good. If not a drag and drop feature, there should be some other easier way to do it than it is now.

I have been using Snowflake for approximately six months.

The experience that we have had until now is that we can use the Snowflake very well from the videos on the web. The knowledge that our company already has regarding this solution has helped. We are producing some very sophisticated solutions. There is plenty of material on the web that you would be able to have lessons and learn.

We have worked a lot with Tableau previously.

We deploy the solution on-premises because we are developers, the customer is the one who has it on the Cloud. We helped them with the on-premises deployment and then we install the software and we deployed our solutions made on-premises. We complete any changes that need to be done in order to work in the customer's landscape.

The time of the deployment depends on the solution the customer requires. If it's a small solution, typically it will take approximately two weeks. A medium solution, that takes from two weeks to eight weeks.  However, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish with the solution. If you are trying to do a very complex data warehouse, it's not the tool that times the most time, it's the analysis and design that takes the most time for deployment. Once that you have the analysis, design, and you transport them to Snowflake this is not difficult.

In any BI solution, you have a lot of changes because of what you need to do with the end-users, there are a lot of changes to the end-user. This can also take up some time for the deployment for the first time. It can take two to six weeks for a medium-sized project.

On average a small project can take three people. That's in small BI projects, in some customers that we have the project takes a maximum of six weeks in order to have all the data fields. This is not for a whole data warehouse but for sales and customers. Those are all small to medium-sized projects, that require three people maximum for deployment. You might always want to have in addition, an analyst and the senior architect. 

Most of our team are technicians.

Snowflake has a lot of capabilities and performance. However, the tool is not a silver bullet and can do everything. If you designed what you need according to the tool, then everything is going to be okay.

This is true for any tool. Many people start the projects without validating what they are going to expect to have at the end, they receive a big surprise. They were thinking that the tool has this capability and it doesn't have it or perhaps it has the capability but the design you have does not work correctly.

If you see the percentage of projects in the different customers in many places, such as in Mexico, Florida, and Miami. Snowflake is a tool that is currently being used but has not been in the past. There is not a lot of history.

I rate Snowflake a six out of ten.

We have not used Snowflake long enough to better rate it. If we had a lot more formal education or had more information or reference manuals our experience would be better.

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.

We use the solution for a data warehouse and we generating reports and dashboards.

Snowflake has improved my organization because of its high performance compared to the old way we used to operate with Microsoft SQL Server. We are migrating everything from SQL Server to Snowflake. It used to take a lot of time to query the database but now it is done a lot faster, we receive millions and billions of reports. This is a major benefit because it is our major use case.

The most valuable features are sharing data, Time Travel, Zero Copy Cloning, performance, and speed.

The solution is very easy to run the queries. We have a built-in query optimizer in Snowflake that works very well.

The UI could improve because sometimes in the security query the UI freezes. We then have to close the window and restart.

There should be an IDE concept similar to the Java IDE or Eclipse feature. I should be able to see all of the functions available on a particular object. Every time we need to go to the Snowflake documentation and look if there are any methods we need. It is hard to remember everything, go and search, and use that that eventually found method. If it was possible to list out all the methods and functions available in an object that would help the developer's a lot.

In an upcoming release, we should be able to send or receive data from external systems but this is not able to be done. There should be built-in logging and monitoring features, we should not need to be dependant on third-party solutions, such as Splunk. There should be more DevOps features to reduce the usage of third-party tools. If these features were part of Snowflake it would be a fully functional complete solution.

I have been using Snowflake for approximately two and a half years. 

They claim zero maintenance support and from my experience, I would agree with that statement. When I was on a previous project we had a lot of support for the Netezza platform we were using. We had approximately twelve people, three onsite and seven offshore. When we migrated from Netezza to Snowflake we reduced the number of people required and kept only some of the team as developers. There is very little support required for this solution. Stability is very good in SnowFlake.

The scalability is built into this solution as being on the cloud. It is able to scale in all directions. Additionally, they have a multi-cluster warehouse, and based on the business use case it is very good.

There are approximately 4,000 portals. However, we do not know how many users our clients have that are using their portals.

We are building new data warehouses and we are migrating from SQL Server to Snowflake.

The support is very good. We create tickets and they respond with a solution.

We were using SQL Server previously and we switched because of the increased performance, multi-clustered shared environment, scalability, and we wanted to use a cloud-based solution.

Everything with the installation went smoothly. I believe when I joined the company Snowflake was already here. They bought the Business Edition that is encrypted everywhere because they are a financial insurance company and most of them choose the Business Edition because of the security.

The company I work for used SnowFlake integrators for implementation assistance.

I have evaluated Eclipse and IBM Netezza.

The solution is very easy and flexible to integrate with any type of API.

I rate Snowflake a nine out of ten.

The solution is primarily used as a data warehouse.

The solution is very easy to use.

The product is very stable and flexible. The performance is good.

The product is quite scalable.

The solution needs to offer more functionality related to machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The solution needs more connectors.

I've been using the solution for close to two years.

The solution is very stable and extremely reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is very good.

The scalability of the solution is very good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with ease.

We have about 100 people on the product currently.

Technical support overall has been good. They are helpful and responsive. We have no complaints. 

I have some experience with Teradata.

There is no installation process, as it is run as software as a service on the cloud.

For deployment, I would say two to five people would be enough. It depends on the size of the project and can have from one person to 20 people supporting it. It really depends on the implementation. The people would likely be admins, engineers, and managers.

The product requires the purchase of an annual license.

Before choosing this solution, we looked at SQL Server and Teradata.

We're customers and end-users.

We're using the latest version of the solution. I can't speak to the exact version number.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been mostly very happy with its capabilities.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies.

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. 

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. 

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.

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

I've been using this solution for two years. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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

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. 

We are completely migrating to Snowflake, and we are in transition. It is primarily to combine all our data repositories into a single place. We have SAP BW and SAP HANA, and some of our business units have their own databases. We chose Snowflake to consolidate all of our data into a single place and then build enterprise data. We are then going to provide the data for our businesses in shared databases, on which they would do reporting. They will also have the ability to bring in their own data, which is currently not possible. They will also be able to do advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI in Snowflake, which is not fully possible on our current platforms. It will be used for all the operational reporting, such as sales, supply chain, appraising, and merchandising. We just started to do reporting related to sales and supply chain inventory.

We have its latest version. It is currently deployed on Amazon AWS, but we are moving to Google.

There are so many features that Snowflake offers to address the challenges that people have been facing in the traditional data warehouses for a long time. It allows us to have a single repository for all the data. Currently, we have data repositories all over the place, and we want to bring everyone onto one platform so that it can be utilized across the organization. Currently, we need database administrators and SAP administrators to manage multiple databases and platforms. With Snowflake, we don't need any admin, and there is zero maintenance. All we need is a platform architect who can just manage the Snowflake platform to create databases and security roles, and then you can share the data. By integrating everything into a single Snowflake platform, we have lowered the total cost of ownership quite a bit.

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.

They need to incorporate some basic OLAP capabilities in the backend or at the database level. Currently, it is purely a database. They call it purely a data warehouse for the cloud. Currently, just like any database, we have to calculate all the KPIs in the front-end tools. The same KPIs again need to be calculated in Snowflake. It would be very helpful if they can include some OLAP features. This will bring efficiency because we will be able to create the KPIs within Snowflake itself and then publish them to multiple front-end tools. We won't have to recreate the same in each project. 

There should be the ability to automate raised queries, which is currently not possible. There should also be something for Exception Aggregation and things like that.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is all cloud. It is really stable. We haven't seen any problems.

We can scale up or down based on our needs. We don't have tons and tons of data, but based on the quality feedback from our vendors, it can handle large volumes and has the competency. With the dynamic scale-up feature, we are confident that it is going to meet all our requirements.

Currently, our number of users is very limited because we have just started the migration. We don't have many users on the platform. All of our focus is on Snowflake because we're moving to Snowflake, and its usage will increase in the future.

I do not directly interact with the support, but I believe our platform architect reached out, and he got a response.

We had SAP BW and SAP HANA as our main data platforms. We are slowly decommissioning SAP BW and SAP HANA and completely migrating to Snowflake. We wanted to have a single repository for all the data. The cost was also a factor.

It is straightforward. To expose the data in the cloud, we had to go through our info security and legal, so that's the part that took time. After that is done, the process for setting up the platform, getting signed up with the initial free credits, and signing up the licensing for the credits was straightforward.

We are working with a system integrator or vendor for this project. Our strategy is to work with an experienced vendor for the first project, and after that, we would be able to drive things forward.

Our experience with them is good. They're building the architecture of Snowflake. They have experience, and we have our own thoughts. We are working together and making sure that the architecture is for the long-term and not just for one project. Whenever we see that their focus is limited to the project, we are asking them questions to make sure that they are making the right decision.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require any maintenance, but you do require architects. We have three architects. One architect is responsible for the platform and takes care of creating security rules, grants, and users. We also have an integration architect who is responsible for data acquisition, ETL, and stuff like that. We have a data architect who is responsible for the overall data architecture in terms of what layers we need to establish and how do we model the data and publish that for consumption.

There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only pay for what you use. 

The key part is skill set because Snowflake is all SQL-driven data warehousing. Internally, we have some SAP BW development resources, and they need to learn and move on to understanding SQL-based coding and custom data warehousing concepts.

I would rate Snowflake a nine out of ten.