Hello community,
My
company has a database of no more than 5 GBS worth of data. We had been
using Microsoft Access for years, but my boss decided to move the data
to the cloud and the process has been horrible. We hired someone to create the database and an online portal to enter data. It is fraught
with glitches and he is slow to work/respond.
This is my understanding thus far:
- The database is stored on Google Cloud
- We add data to the database via our company website (we need to log in with our Microsoft account to access the site).
- The company, Snowflake, is involved somehow, but I am not sure how. I believe we pay them every time we run a query.
- We utilize Power BI to visualize our data.
I feel like my company is wasting a lot of money. Our database is relatively small.
I wanted to know the following:
- Do we need Snowflake? Can’t we work just using Google Cloud? Snowflake is crazy expensive and I don’t see the point of it.
- If we need some company similar to Snowflake, can we use Google’s BigQuery instead? What about Microsoft’s ecosystem?
Thank you for your help!
Hi
Zack, 5 GB data is a very small DB, and unless you have a heavy load
on your system, it shall work fine on any regular DB. Due to the fact
that until now
you worked with Microsoft
Access, it does not make sense that your problems are due to a load
on the system. In this case, I think that any DB like MySql
or other DB’s running on Google Cloud can be a better solution. In
Snowflake you are paying for storage and per transaction, and you
have the option to do some tuning, in other Cloud DB’s you are
paying for storage and compute time, so you should do some searches and
pilots to find the cheapest solution for your system. In any case, if
you have Snowflake, it is a very fast DB, so it could be that the
problems you have are due to networking issues.
Hi Zach, that is a great question.
The answer to that question is not so easy to answer. The answer to that depends on the type of workload you are looking to implement in either Snowflake or Google Big Query. There are differences in databases you can use to handle transactional queries and analytical queries.
I am happy to discuss this in more detail, to make sure that the best choice is made for your organization. Please feel free to reach out to me and we can organize a meeting to catch up.
Kind Regards,
Sarath