Snowflake Reviews

We use the solution as a data warehouse for our financial services firm. 

The core feature of the platform is everything works, and that's what I like about it. Our time to market is faster, it requires less maintenance, and I can build and deploy a product exceptionally quickly.

Everything is automatic, and I don't have to do any maintenance.

I want tokenization, so they could either acquire a company that does tokenization or somehow integrate with one. If I could do tokenization in line with other development without having a third-party system, that would ease integration and security, of course.

More data governance and access control features would be a welcome addition.

We have been using Snowflake for about three and a half years. 

Snowflake is a stable platform. 

The power of Snowflake is that it scales automatically and indefinitely. We have around 500 internal users using the solution daily, and most of our applications use the product in some shape or form, so that's a few hundred thousand external users.

The support model is that we have a Snowflake rep, and if I need anything, I can reach out to him, and he can get people on board within minutes. The support is fantastic.

Positive

We weren't satisfied with our data warehouse, AWS Redshift, Oracle, and some on-prem elements such as a SQL Server. We wanted a cloud data warehouse that didn't require a lot of manual intervention and maintenance, DBAs and so on. We wanted a solution that could scale automatically and pay-as-you-go to cut down on wasteful infrastructure. Therefore, Snowflake made a lot of sense, plus compared to Redshift at the time, the separation of storage and computing was huge. That was an essential differentiator for us.

We previously used ThoughtSpot, specifically their Falcon engine, their appliance version, and it did everything on its own. We brought in Snowflake later when ThoughtSpot introduced their product called Embrace. We were among the earliest adopters to switch, and six to eight months after, we integrated with Snowflake.

The initial setup was straightforward; it was one of the easiest I've done, so I rate the solution five out of five for ease of setup.

We carried out the deployment in-house, and Snowflake is a SaaS solution, so setup was rapid. All we needed was some user account information. 

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. 

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

Snowflake is ahead of the competitors because it's completely automatic and hands-off in terms of maintenance. Many of the competitor products have similar features to Snowflake, but what they call automatic still requires someone to understand it. If they give us 100 levers, somebody has to know what each of them does and when to pull them, whereas Snowflake is entirely hands-off.

My advice to potential customers is to have a team member who understands performance tuning and to figure out optimal credit usage ahead of time to avoid wasteful spending.

The implementation is essential because the solution provides a lot of power out of the box, and the initial configuration needs to be fit for purpose. If I have a relatively small use case where I don't need much power or don't have much data, the product needs to be configured for that. As opposed to an external case where I might need high power for a government job, for example, then the configuration needs to be scaled up.

The solution is very good for building data warehouses. However, it has some limitations if we need it for more use cases.

All the features of the product that are needed for the data warehouse are good. The solution enables the ingestion of data and the usability of preferred languages while creating the data. The performance of the engine is good. The solution speeds up the process of onboarding. We can connect to different sources and get the data very fast. 

The tool does a very good job in reporting and data transformation. We can adapt it well to our needs. When we try to ingest data from many sources, it helps harmonize the data sources. It also helps with duplication and cleaning of the data. It is a pretty difficult and time-consuming task, and Snowflake helps us with it.

I do not like the proprietary format of the solution. Getting data out of the tool to third-party applications is difficult. The data science workloads must be improved. Snowflake has a lot to learn. There are better options in the market for data science.

I have been using the solution for almost three years.

The tool is stable. I rate the stability a nine or ten out of ten.

If we need to scale up, it will impact our costs. I work in a consulting company. We have a department dedicated to Snowflake. We have seven to eight people on our team. Our clients were medium-sized businesses with 1000 employees. They are focused on data analytics solutions. They also have departments for Azure and AWS. I rate the tool’s scalability a seven or eight out of ten.

I rate the ease of setup a seven or eight out of ten. The tool is deployed on the cloud. The time taken for deployment depends on the workload and how we build it.

The solution is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten.

We are partners. The impact of the solution’s automatic scaling feature on the workload depends on how we build our workload. The vendor must take a look at the market and how technologies evolve. The solution can do more in the area of distributed systems. If our use cases require data scientists, I rate the tool a three or four out of ten. I rate the tool a nine or ten out of ten for SQL data warehouse use cases. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

Our current plan and use case for this solution is to migrate the data from on-premises to the cloud. We are currently using on-prem monitor data and providing it on the cloud. We are using Snowflake so that once the data is in there, we are trying to create shares over it so that external systems can't consume it.

The features I found most valuable with this solution are sharing options and built-in time zone conversion.

I see room for improvement when it comes to credit performance. The other thing I'd like to be improved is the warehouse facility. 

In the next release, I'd like to see easier connectivity to the on-premises tools.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

My impression from using this product for the last three years is that it is quite stable.

My impression is that this is a scalable solution. There are around 200 users of this solution at our company, including three administrators.

The initial setup process was not that complex and it took around six months.

The implementation was done by an in-house team.

My impression is that the pricing of this solution is reasonable.

I would rate this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

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.

The solution is primarily used for data warehousing. 

It's a good tool. It is quite easy to manage. 

There are a lot of features. 

If you accidentally delete something, you can time travel and retrieve it. 

Within half an hour or even 15 minutes, you can set up a new data warehouse, and you can clone a table or whatever you like. 

It's easy to provide access to clients if they need to.

The solution is stable. 

It can scale well.

There is good online documentation via the community, and you can learn the solution on your own. 

These days, they are pushing users towards the GUI or graphical version. However, I am more familiar with the classic version. I'd like to continue to work with it using the older approach. That's just a personal choice. I prefer the database views like you would get on an SQL Server or other databases. 

I've been using the solution for two and a half years or so. I haven't used it for too long. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. I've never had an issue when you connect it to your infrastructure. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. 

We have 250 or more users on the solution currently. They are predominantly IT specialists, including engineers and developers. It's for those on the application side of development. The solution is scalable. I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten.

I've never directly dealt with technical support. We do have a direct contact. There are other people who might have. There might have been a version issue at some point. However, it wasn't something I dealt with. I've only interacted with the Snowflake community pages. 

We are currently moving everything from Oracle to Snowflake. 

We've used a combination of other tools in the past. We've used Microsoft's Stack, for example. We were using a SQL database in the past. 

We're migrating from Oracle right now. We have two people that handle the maintenance of the solution. A company may need two to four engineers to manage maintenance 24/7.

It's not difficult to deploy. It's pretty straightforward. It took us only a couple of minutes in order to get everything up and running. 

We pay a licensing fee to use the solution. It's paid monthly. My understanding is that it is not that expensive. We might have a specific extra cost surrounding running it on a private cloud. I'd rate the cost as six out of ten. It's moderately priced compared to others on the market. That said, I don't directly manage the account and don't directly deal with pricing. We have a contract of three to five years. 

I'm an end-user. 

Everything is on the cloud, and therefore I'm always using the latest version of the solution. It updates itself regularly. 

It fulfills our needs, and it's easy to pick up by looking at some reference guides. I'm still getting used to the GUI. I might find it even easier to use if I go through more formal training. Right now, I've simply learned it on my own. Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We're using it more for data warehousing and distribution.

Snowflake is a SaaS platform, so I'm using whatever is the latest version.

It's definitely for compute. The best use case of Snowflake is massive compute. With the parallel reads that we can do from Snowflake, we can combine data from disparate sources, consolidate it, and provide it to end clients through custom stored procedures.

It's user-friendly. It's SQL-driven. The fact that business can also go to this application and query because they know SQL is the biggest factor. So, we can provide all the data, and the analysts, data scientists, and product strategists can go and analyze the data themselves.

Room for improvement would be writebacks. It doesn't support extensively writing back to the database, and it doesn't support web applications effectively. Ultimately, it's a database call, so if we are building web applications using Snowflake, it isn't that effective because there is some turnaround time from the database.

I'd like them to look into the limitations of REST API. Snowflake came up with this native API concept, but it has got a lot of limitations. I'd like to see it provide better service-based APIs so that it can provide data as a service.

I've used Snowflake for over three years.

Its stability is fine, but of late, I get loads of messages saying there's some sort of outage or some sort of issue in the application. I keep getting these notifications from Snowflake, which gives a false impression that something wrong is happening, and it might be underlying in the backend. It doesn't seem that stable.

Its scalability is high. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of scalability.

At this time, we have no plans to increase its usage.

Their support is good.

Prior to Snowflake, it was a completely Greenfield requirement.

It was very straightforward.

It required just two people. One from the Snowflake perspective, and one from my team members' perspective to get the configuration running. That's it.

We haven't yet seen a return on investment because some of the applications are yet to be fruitful and make revenue. We have used Snowflake for the past three years at this point, but we have not yet made great revenue.

It's expensive.

Snowflake is very useful as a data lake and as a data warehouse. Also, it has a lot of features with respect to data science. We are not there yet, but if there are any specific use cases around compute, data distribution, and data sharing, then Snowflake is a tool to be considered.

I'd rate Snowflake a seven out of ten.

We use Snowflake for our data warehouse. Amazing product. Redshift cannot compete with a true elastic data warehouse where you can scale computing by just issuing a SQL query (increase computer power) and resizing it down or putting computing unit to sleep. 

Snowflake has many more features:

When combined with Alooma, it's the best data integration system. No need for Talend and all these cumbersome tools.

We were able to implement the entire data eco-system in less than five months, from data integration, data warehousing, ELT, producing fact and dimensional tables, and finally reports.

• Computing unit is accessible via SQL: being able to turn them on or off as needed.
• Snowpipe (ingesting data)
• Looking back in time (being able to look at data in the past within a query)
• No data warehouse management
• Support for JSON.

The list is pretty long.

• Snowpipe auto-ingest should be automatic.
• A better client UI or command line tool: I think SnowSQL is a little awkward.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Used it at a previous company.

Yes. No hardware or server config is needed. Just create a user account.

In-house.

Very good.

Snowflake computing is very affordable. Less expensive than Redshift.

Yes. I looked at Redshift and Vertica.

Our primary use case for Snowflake is inputting data generated by AWS.

This solution has helped our organization by being easy to maintain and having good technical support.

The features I have found most valuable are the options to connect with extendable sources in three buckets in which we can also create stages.

I think that Snowflake could improve its user interface. The current one is not interactive.

I have been using this solution for about one year.

I would rate the stability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a 10, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. There are around five developers in our company and 500 end users for this solution.

We previously worked in AWS.

I would rate the initial setup process an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would advise other people trying to use this solution to build a skill balance as it's quite difficult to work in Snowflake.

I would rate this solution as a whole a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.