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Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Oracle Autonomous Data Ware...
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is 4.6%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 20.5%, down from 22.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Miodrag Milojevic - PeerSpot reviewer
A tool for data warehousing that offers scalability, stability, and ease of setup
The initial setup of Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is easy and basic, especially if one doesn't use the tricks to get Oracle Exadata for use. One doesn't need to know or be involved in technical stuff to do the setup since, at the least, knowledge might be required when working with some external connections, but it is easy because everything can be done within a couple of clicks. The solution is deployed on the cloud. For deployment, you don't need any technical guidance since you can sit, find it on the web, and prepare an Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse platform by yourself for free for a limited time. The people needed for the deployment and maintenance depend on the implementation one wants. If you do a simple implementation, you don't need anybody for maintenance since everything is on the cloud. You only have to schedule your backup or see if Oracle can schedule a backup, and you don't take care of the backup. For some more sophisticated or technical implementations, you will need staff for some data warehouse except for some parts of the maintenance like backup, patches, or upgrades since these are a few things you take care of in the background, and you only seek help with the maintenance part, if needed.
Snehasish Das - PeerSpot reviewer
Transformation in data querying speed with good migration capabilities
Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses. One key feature is the separation of compute and storage, which eliminates storage limitations. It also has tools for migrating data from legacy databases like Oracle. Its stability and efficiency enhance performance greatly. Tools in the AI/ML marketplace are readily available without needing development.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I really like the auto-tuning, auto-scaling, and the automatic load balancing and query tuning in the system."
"I loved the simplicity of loading the data and simply relying on the self-tuning capabilities of ADW."
"The solution has a self-backup, so you don't need a DBA (database administrator) to do a backup."
"It provides Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) capabilities by default to address data security issues."
"One advantage is that if you already have an Oracle Database, it easily integrates with that."
"It is a stable and scalable solution."
"The product is easy to use."
"It is a very stable tool...It is an extremely scalable tool."
"As long as you don't need to worry about the storage or cost, this solution would be one of the best ones on the market for scalability purposes."
"It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"The most valuable feature is the clone copy."
"The thing I find most valuable is that scalability, space storage, and computing power is separate. When you scale up, it is live from one second to the next — constantly available as you scale — so there is no downtime or interruption of services."
"Everything is automatic, and I don't have to do any maintenance."
"It is very fast and the performance is great."
"The platform's most valuable features include its ability to effectively summarize and manage large datasets, allowing multiple teams to analyze and generate insights."
 

Cons

"They should make the solution more user-friendly."
"The installation process is complex. Oracle can make the installation process better."
"It doesn't work well when you have unstructured data or you need online analytics. It is not as nice as Hadoop in these aspects."
"There is a need for more storage to be allocated, but over a period of time, it becomes impossible to reduce it after using it."
"Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is not available as an on-premises solution."
"Optimization should be better."
"Ease of connectivity could be improved."
"One of the major problem is creating custom tablespace. The ADB serverless option doesn't support custom tablespace creation, which could cause issues during on-premise database migration that requires specifically named tablespace. There should be an option to create customized tablespace."
"Their UiPath, the workspace area, needs some work."
"The complexity of the initial setup of Snowflake depends on the use case. However, Snowflake itself, we don't set it up. The difficulty comes from the ingestion patterns, depending on what data I'm putting in, what kind of enrichment, and what additional value we have to add. However, it does tend to get complex because we have a lot of semi-structured data which we need to handle in Snowflake. There have been some challenges."
"I see room for improvement when it comes to credit performance. The other thing I'd like to be improved is the warehouse facility."
"If they could bring in some tools for data integration, it would be really great."
"From an improvement perspective, Snowflake can evolve in terms of writing costly, expensive queries with less cost and try to see if pipeline development can be made a little easier."
"Pricing is an issue for many customers."
"There are three things that came to my notice. I am not very sure whether they have already done it. The first one is very specific to the virtual data warehouse. Snowflake might want to offer industry-specific models for the data warehouse. Snowflake is a very strong product with credit. For a typical retail industry, such as the pharma industry, if it can get into the functional space as well, it will be a big shot in their arm. The second thing is related to the migration from other data warehouses to Snowflake. They can make the migration a little bit more seamless and easy. It should be compatible, well-structured, and well-governed. Many enterprises have huge impetus and urgency to move to Snowflake from their existing data warehouse, so, naturally, this is an area that is critical. The third thing is related to the capability of dealing with relational and dimensional structures. It is not that friendly with relational structures. Snowflake is more friendly with the dimensional structure or the data masks, which is characteristic of a Kimball model. It is very difficult to be savvy and friendly with both structures because these structures are different and address different kinds of needs. One is manipulation-heavy, and the other one is read-heavy or analysis-heavy. One is for heavy or frequent changes and amendments, and the other one is for frequent reads. One is flat, and the other one is distributed. There are fundamental differences between these two structures. If I were to consider Snowflake as a silver bullet, it should be equally savvy on both ends, which I don't think is the case. Maybe the product has grown and scaled up from where it was."
"Snowflake needs transparency over costs and pricing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In terms of architecture and pricing structure, I feel it is a little bit costly compared to Azure. It's fine compared to RedShift, but compared to Azure, it's a bit pricey when you calculate for one TB storage plus around five hours of reporting with the frequency of 1TB data. The cost adds up, making Oracle a bit expensive."
"You pay as you go, and you don't pay for services that you don't use."
"The licensing cost of the product can vary since you can integrate it very easily with other products or other cloud products...You pay as you use it, so it is not yearly or monthly payments to be made toward Oracle."
"The solution's cost is reasonable."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing an eight."
"The price depends on the configuration we choose."
"Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse's pricing is fair and reasonable compared to the other cloud vendors."
"The cost is perfect with Oracle Universal credit."
"The pricing part is based on the computing and storage. The costs are different and then there are services costs as well."
"The pricing for Snowflake is competitive."
"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."
"We use Snowflake pretty heavily. We pay a significant amount of money for the tool. I'd say we pay $300k to $400K every year."
"It is not cheap."
"You need to be aware of the bloating costs. It is easy to use, but if you don't use it wisely, then your monthly bill can bloat a lot. You need to be a bit aware of its consumption cost."
"On average, with the number of queries that we run, we pay approximately $200 USD per month."
"The solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
49%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Educational Organization
40%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse?
With Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, things are much simpler. Creating a structure, initializing the servers, extending the servers, those are all things that are very, very easy. That's the main...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse?
We pay approximately $70,000 per month. The cost includes maintenance and support.
What needs improvement with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse?
Optimization should be better. The SQLs are sometimes very slow. I also noticed that Java is not supported, which is not ideal.
What do you like most about Snowflake?
The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
Snowflake's pricing is on the higher side, rated as eight out of ten. If there were ways to reduce costs, it would be a positive improvement.
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Cost reduction is one area I would like Snowflake to improve. The product is not very cheap, and a reduction in costs would be appreciated.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hertz, TaylorMade Golf, Outront Media, Kingold, FSmart, Drop-Tank
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.