Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing solution for storing and processing data, generating reports and dashboards, and as a BI reporting source. It is used for optimizing costs and using financial data, as well as for migrating data from on-premises to the cloud. The solution is often used as a centralized data warehouse, combining data from multiple sources.
| Type | Title | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Cloud Data Warehouse | Mar 27, 2025 | Download |
| Product | Reviews, tips, and advice from real users | Mar 27, 2025 | Download |
| Comparison | Snowflake vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics | Mar 27, 2025 | Download |
| Comparison | Snowflake vs Azure Data Factory | Mar 27, 2025 | Download |
| Comparison | Snowflake vs BigQuery | Mar 27, 2025 | Download |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Azure Data Factory | 4.0 | 8.6% | 92% | 90 interviewsAdd to research |
| Teradata | 4.1 | 8.9% | 87% | 76 interviewsAdd to research |
Snowflake has helped organizations improve query performance, store and process JSON and XML, consolidate multiple databases into one unified table, power company-wide dashboards, increase productivity, reduce processing time, and have easy maintenance with good technical support.
Its platform is made up of three components:
Snowflake has many valuable vital features. Some of the most useful ones include:
There are many benefits to implementing Snowflake. It helps optimize costs, reduce downtime, improve operational efficiency, and automate data replication for fast recovery, and it is built for high reliability and availability.
Below are quotes from interviews we conducted with users currently using the Snowflake solution:
Sreenivasan R., Director of Data Architecture and Engineering at Decision Minds, says, "Data sharing is a good feature. It is a majorly used feature. The elastic computing is another big feature. Separating computing and storage gives you flexibility. It doesn't require much DBA involvement because it doesn't need any performance tuning. We are not doing any performance tuning, and the entire burden of performance 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."
A director of business operations at a logistics company mentions, "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."
A Solution Architect at a wholesaler/distributor comments, "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."
Snowflake was previously known as Snowflake Computing.
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Snowflake is used for very large data, such as in the case where tables might contain 600 to 700 million records.
It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient.
The pricing and licensing model is good.
Snowflake has support for stored procedures, but it is not that powerful. They have a lot of limitations. For example, it is really basic and there are limitations on subqueries.
The functions are not very good. Improving this would help to make sure data manipulation much easier. Right now, the inbuilt stored procedures and functions are all Java-based.
I Have been using SnowFlake for about five months.
We have approximately 10 people in the organization who are using Snowflake.
The technical support is very good.
We use Snowflake in conjunction with Matillion, which is another AWS-based ETL tool. It is being used as a bridge between our on-premises data and Snowflake.
The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply log in and start using it.
When it comes to deployment, you can choose between the AWS and Azure cloud. We chose AWS.
It is easy to create an instance and you can do it yourself if you have an AWS account. Snowflake will give you the connection ID and other relevant details.
The pricing is flexible in that, for example, if I run a query and it is slow then I can increase the processing power while it is still running, and they charge more for the time. The cost is on a per-query basis.
If you're running with a base processor, called a warehouse, the query might cost 1.0 cents. But, if my query is slow and I want to increase the speed, the next level adds a little more cost to that.
On average, with the number of queries that we run, we pay approximately $200 USD per month.
Recently, we have been doing a review of Redshift. However, we finally decided to go with Snowflake.
My advice for anybody who is considering Snowflake is that it is a really good product, especially if you are having issues with Big Data. It is not good for a typical OLTP environment, such as a small table.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
