Snowflake Reviews

Our aim was to migrate everything from on-premise, so we just migrated as it is and then we had issues. Some use cases that were running on-premises were not installed. We just went through each case and then finalized the issues with some of the packages that were not working or some users that were not getting what they were expecting. We did deep analysis on each and every case and then looked for options in Snowflake and are now working with the team to move everything over to Snowflake. 

The data warehouse is one of the great concepts of Snowflake. The coding plans are also a great feature. You can switch out the values or sizes. 

It would be helpful if implementation could be handled more on the user-side. We need to train the users on best practices and how to use the solution properly. It's a cost issue. If they don't run it properly then it'll end up costing more money.

There are some stored procedures that we've had trouble with. The solution also needs to fine-tune the connectors to be able to connect into the system source.

The solution is stable. We had only one failure, but that was because of AWS issues. Beyond that, I haven't seen anything else. From the Snowflake side, within 10 minutes they reported the AWS issue. It was under two hours of downtime because of the quick response.

As long as you don't need to worry about storage or cost, this solution would be one of the best ones on the market for scalability purposes. We've migrated about 400-450 dealers onto the solution so far. We do intend to expand usage so there will be more users and more data. The drawbacks we've had with on-premises was space being a constraint and the user code having limitations.

Customer support is good. There is always someone who's going to respond. They will let you know what can be done and what is possible.

We did some testing and some comparisons, but it's all set up now and running fine. The deployment took about three months. Since we didn't want to disrupt the on-premises, or overload the system, we did most of the migrations on the weekend.

For maintenance, in the beginning, until you are through with training and performance tuning, you will need more people. You might need to start with seven or so, and then, for ongoing work, probably one or two people can manage it. 

We had a Snowflake consultant on-site that assisted us with the implementation.

It's an expensive solution. We can't predict exactly how much until we've streamlined everything and the user requirements have been completed, but normally they charge on the storage, which depends upon the average storage amount used for the month.

We looked at IBM because it also has on-premise solutions. We also looked at Azure as well as AWS.

Because most of the issues you come across can be dealt with on the user's sites, it's important to educate the users and understand their requirements.

The best advice I can give is to understand the product and to try to stick to what is required. From the business side, you need to monitor usage and monitor the space because of on-premises constraints. If it gets filled up then you will have to react. However, this solution is very scalable. 

I would rate this solution between seven and eight out of ten. The solution still has some constraints that need to be addressed.

We're running a POC to test scalability, performance, on-demand resource management, workload management, et cetera. The security aspect will also be important for us.

The product offers a lot of great features.

Architectural-wise, it's got great architecture. That's what we are looking for. It's kind of decoupled from storage and has virtual warehouses. We like that we can travel and keep things virtual. For us, the virtual warehousing is likely the most valuable aspect. You can spin up as many virtual warehouses that you want. That's quite useful as a feature.

I haven't found that the solution is lacking any features. It's quite complete.

I would like to see a client version of the GUI. Right now, it is a web GUI, which has stored the SQL, the worksheets. We are asking for that from Snowflake. We'd like to understand how can we save these worksheets on our local desktop. That is not there at this point.

I've been using the solution for about the past year as part of a POC.

In the past, we've used an SQL server. On the cloud side of it, we do have some experience. Snowflake, however, is the new data warehouse solution that we are looking into it.

If necessary, we may have to get into Synapse, and do a kind of a pilot project with that as well. We may evaluate them both to see which is better. We are not there yet. We are just working on Snowflake.

We are a direct customer and end-user.

We've been using the solution during a POC for the last year or so. It's a pilot project to test its feasibility for our company. We're just starting to get performance stats and stuff like that.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are currently using. I don't recall the exact version number. Usually, people are running the latest version. Whatever the latest available option is is likely the number we are on.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're still in the POC phase, however, based on what we have seen, we are quite satisfied.

We primarily use the solution for the data warehouse.

The solution offers everything you'd find on Azure or AWS. It has a lot of industry-standard features and capabilities.

The product has excellent autoscaling. We can actually compute and scale-out at the same time without having to depend on other tools. You can do it on the fly, or within queries, etc.

The Visual Copy Cloning is definitely one feature that everyone looks forward to due to the fact that it gives you regular backups. 

The solution offers a very good time travel function that allows you to travel back in time to before your systems we corrupted. You can go back into your history and grab the last backup before corruption so that you regain almost everything you need. It gives you 90 days to fetch the data back if you need to. It's better than Azure options.

We've spoken with Snowflake about the fact that there are a few bare minimum requirements now these days for any data cloud, data lake, or platform. They've lacked a bit here, however, they're adopting some new measures that will be available in the next release, so that is sorted.

Snowflake is partners with only AWS as a cloud platform. However, in India, Microsoft has got a big subscription. The product needs to be able to adapt to Azure a bit more in order to meet the local market demands. 

It's difficult to know how to size everything correctly.

They should incorporate at least a basic ETL framework.

It's early days, however, I would put the solution at a seven out of ten. It needs a bit more time to mature. If I were to look at it strictly from a warehousing perspective, I'd rate it at an eight out of ten.

I've been using the solution for about ten months. I started using it originally when we started our partnership with the organization.

The one thing that seems to be unclear for Snowflake customers is the cluster sizing. No one seems ot know how to compute that.

For example, if I'm running a warehouse that is extra small, as per my query performance, if I see like if this query will run perfectly on the machine I will have. However, I don't know which machine to go for. There's no direct comparison between an extra small, or a small, or a medium warehouse. I never get to know, unless I run the case query on different sizes, which to go for. It's hard to say "Buy only this and go for that particular size". Sizing seems to be a bit of trial and error. If they had some sort of benchmarking around their cluster size, that would be helpful.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We didn't have any issues with implementation. It's not too complex.

The pricing of the solution is fine. The storage is pretty cheap. They also offer a lot of discounts. The cost shouldn't really be a problem. 

That said, the agreement should be more of a subscription basis instead of asking for a commitment. For example, Microsoft tells your the price and allows you to subscribe to that, whereas, Snowflake wants you to commit to a certain amount of time before they really give you firm pricing. 

We're partners with Snowflake. We've been partners for just under a year at this point.

I'd definitely recommend the product. It's worked quite well for us. 

A new customer needs to understand, however, that they need a roadmap of at least five years when they are deciding on their data warehouse. They should compare costs and sizing to make sure they are getting the solution that makes sense for their current and future needs. 

The solution integrates well with other applications, and if you need it to integrate with existing applications, you still should check to make sure it's possible.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend Azure over Snowflake, as they aren't really a good comparison. Snowflake is more focused on data repositories and data warehouses. AWS does give you many options, however.

We have different data models established on Snowflake so our primary use case is to store data from different sources, such as Azure Data Factory, or Databricks. We use it to create the data coming from different sources, and then we store the data. In addition, we also have a reporting structure that we use. We are partners with Snowflake and I'm a lead data engineer. 

The most valuable feature of Snowflake is the Mbps they have established because it's quite a bit faster than any other data warehouse. The solution has different warehouse sizes in place, and we're able to switch through and choose what we want. It can be done in one or two seconds. In other data warehouses, it may take around one minute to set up a different configuration. In Snowflake, it can be done in, two or three seconds. And apart from that, the most important thing given that I have to analyze all this, is that it's very good with the time travel, it's a great feature. 

One thing which I believe Snowflake needs to improve is related to product activation queries. It's not possible to change the warehouse size while executing. It means, for example, that the query is sometimes activated on a larger surface even if I've switched to extra small, the grading in the background is running on extra large. The result is that I have to pay for extra large until the execution is complete. The cost implications can be quite large. There should be a system where they provide a prompt so you can know the current warehouse size.

It would also be helpful if they would simplify the process of using Snowpipe. The way it works now is quite complicated. There are certain steps that you have to follow which is fine but if they could simplify that process, it would be helpful. 

I've been using this solution for a year. 

I've only had one issue related to stability in the past year. 

It's a scalable solution, we have unlimited storage in Snowflake.

The technical support is quite good. We've used them when we've had to implement something and we need some guidance.

The amount of data which we are currently handling, cannot be handled yet in any other data warehouse, but we do have experience with Azure Data Warehouse. We don't have to manage anything with Snowflake, but with Azure we do. Snowflake is much faster, and I believe it is cheaper as well. They have developed it on top of their own system and integrated the concept.

The initial setup is straightforward. It doesn't require any hardware. It's just about getting the account access and having a browser. Everything is done by Snowflake. There is a set process that you need to follow. It is a really fast process, and it helps that the entire migration can be done within minutes. The solution is used on a daily basis by hundreds of people. 

It's pay-as-you-go with Snowflake. The cost is around $US 50 per DB. Terabyte is around $US 50 per month. There are no additional costs. They are divided into two steps to assist the computer power as well as the storage power. Computation cost is relative to the warehouse size. However long our warehouse is up and running, we are charged.

I would definitely recommend this solution. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

Snowflake is used in my organization for our data warehouse.

All the people who are working with Snowflake are extremely happy with it because it is designed from a data-warehousing point of view, not the other way around. You have a database and then you tweak it and then it becomes a data warehouse. 

It has very nice features, such as snapshots, marketplace, and it is very easy to receive data-warehouse specifications.

There could be better ELT tools that are appropriate for Snowflake. We decided on Matillion and it seemed to be the only one. There need to be better choices, it would be great if Snowflake provided an ELT solution that people could use. Additionally, if there was a pure cloud-based ELT tool it would be useful.

I have been using Snowflake for approximately three years.

The installation is very easy. What is needed is a good extract, transform, and load (ELT) tool and we used Matillion.

The price of the solution is reasonable.

My advice to those wanting to implement Snowflake is it is easy. However, the way to choose to implement your data in the warehouse matters. When we started to implement our data with Snowflake, we also switched to a metadata-driven approach, but the method depends on the people involved in the implementation. Overall, the implementation of Snowflake follows similar principles as any other data-warehouse implementation except many aspects are a lot easier and helpful. 

I rate Snowflake an eight 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.

We primarily use the solution in order to have the daily transactions of trades. It's to manipulate and find out the benchmark of every broker and institutional manager.

The solution's most valuable aspect is the ability to process the bulk amount of data and try to clone the database. We try to clone the production database. Instead of syncing the whole database, we can just clone it up and start working on it. Basically, the cloning and the database are very user-friendly.

The solution is very stable.

Right now, Snowflake doesn't have any analytical functions, especially in comparison to Oracle and other databases. The analytical performance needs to improve. It would be ideal if Snowflake was able to use the analytical functions, and what we have in the relational database. That would be really helpful. 

They don't have any SLAs in place. It would be better if they did.

I've been working with the solution for two years now. The company, however, has been using it for three years at this point.

The solution is quite stable. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches.

The solution is definitely scalable. We're able to add nodes to grow it out when we need to. If an organization needs to expand the solution, they can do so easily. We find it to be very reliable.

There are about 300 people using the solution at this time. We don't plan on increasing usage at this time.

Technical support is very, very good. It's a responsive and knowledgable team. We're quite satisfied with the level of service we receive.

That said, Snowflake technical support doesn't have any SLAs. If they had a small amount of SLAs, then it would be helpful for us to clear or solve any production issues, etc. that we may run into.

We need about 50-60 people to maintain the solution.

Snowflake's pricing is a bit higher than other competitors.

We were looking at Amazon Redshift previously. However, we decided that Snowflake was more reliable and scalable.

We're a customer. We don't have a business relationship with the solution.

Users considering adding the solution should understand that Snowflake can be used only for transactional processing, not for analytical processing. If they want to go for transaction processing, they can go for Snowflake and if they want to go for analytical processing, they should look at or go for an Oracle database.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We use Snowflake as a data warehouse and analytics platform. I'm a solution architect and we are customers of Snowflake. 

It's very easy to use, easy to query, and it provides pretty accurate results. It's a market leader. 

The price could be reduced, it's quite high.  

We've been using this solution for about three months. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is highly scalable. 

I haven't used the technical support. 

The initial setup is very easy, especially if you have cloud knowledge. We have around 150 users. 

We moved from Red Shift to Snowflake because of scalability and the independence it provided. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10 and recommend it to other users.