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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
100
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

"It is a very stable tool...It is an extremely scalable tool."
"The product has self-repair features."
"It is an extremely scalable solution since you can dynamically change the resources as some other cloud solutions."
"Self-patching and runs machine-learning across its logs all the time"
"Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is used globally to deliver extreme performance on large Financial data sets."
"It is a stable and scalable solution."
"The product is easy to use."
"The solution is self-securing. All data is encrypted and security updates and patches are applied automatically both periodically and off-cycle."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the ease of use, the rapidness, how quickly the solution can be implemented, and of course that it's been very easy to move from the on-premise world to the Cloud world because Snowflake is based on SQL also."
"It was relatively easy to use, and it was easy for people to convert to it."
"Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses."
"The overall ecosystem was easy to manage. Given that we weren't a very highly technical group, it was preferable to other things we looked at because it could do all of the cloud tunings. It can tune your data warehouse to an appropriate size for controlled billing, resume and sleep functions, and all such things. It was much more simple than doing native Azure or AWS development. It was stable, and their support was also perfect. It was also very easy to deploy. It was one of those rare times where they did exactly what they said they could do."
"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."
"Very easy to use and easy to query."
"They separate compute and storage. You can scale storage independently of the computer, or you can scale computing independently of storage. If you need to buy more computer parts you can add new virtual warehouses in Snowflake. Similarly, if you need more storage, you take more storage. It's most scalable in the database essentially; typically you don't have this scalability independence on-premises."
"The most valuable features are sharing data, Time Travel, Zero Copy Cloning, performance, and speed."
 

Cons

"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."
"The solution lacks visibility options."
"The installation process is complex. Oracle can make the installation process better."
"The setup is complex."
"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."
"It is very important the integration with other platforms be made to be as easy as it is with an on-premises deployment."
"We are not satisfied with the technical support. Their understanding is lacking."
"Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is not available as an on-premises solution."
"The scheduling system can definitely be better because we had to use external airflow for that. There should be orchestration for the scheduling system. Snowflake currently does not support machine learning, so it is just storage. They also need some alternatives for SQL Query. There should also be support for Spark in different languages such as Python."
"The solution could use a little bit more UI."
"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."
"It doesn't enforce typical relational database constraints. Quite expensive."
"Some SQL language functions could be included."
"Snowflake has to improve their spatial parts since it doesn't have much in terms of geo-spatial queries."
"Snowflake has support for stored procedures, but it is not that powerful."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is perfect with Oracle Universal credit."
"Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse's pricing is fair and reasonable compared to the other cloud vendors."
"The solution is expensive."
"You pay as you go, and you don't pay for services that you don't use."
"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."
"We pay approximately $70,000 per month. The cost includes maintenance and support."
"The price depends on the configuration we choose."
"The solution's cost is reasonable."
"The pricing part is based on the computing and storage. The costs are different and then there are services costs as well."
"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 used Snowflake to see if it is cheaper than using BigQuery. It was just to maintain the cost or the KPI regarding the cost of connectivity by users. Snowflake wasn't cheaper than BigQuery, and its affordability was the main issue."
"Snowflake is expensive, but when I consider what we get for that price, it's fair. I rate the solution three out of five for affordability, right in the middle."
"We're based on credits. So, we're paying four and a half dollars of credit. There are no additional costs. I would rate it a two out of five in terms of pricing."
"Pricing is approximately $US 50 per DB. Terabyte is around $US 50 per month."
"Users have to pay a licensing fee for the solution, which is expensive."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
44%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Educational Organization
37%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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: April 2025.
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