Amazon RDS vs Snowflake

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon Relational Database Service is great when you need a Database solution that can work for you very fast. It is also a great solution when you need a system that can scale to handle very large amounts of data. You can get set up with a complex, large database eco-system in minutes/hours, and have the best security and backups scheduled. The alternative to doing this would typically be hiring one or more very experienced database professionals for not just the implementation, but also on staff to handle the periodic maintenance necessary.

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Gabriel Samaroo

Senior Software Engineer

RocketripComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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Snowflake architecture was designed at its foundation to take advantage of the cloud and then adds some unique benefits that support ease of use and increased productivity. The most popular cloud data warehouse platforms are all powerful tools and solid choices. With an investment in one of these, what really matters is how productive will you be using the data warehouse.Snowflake's 'data-warehouse-as-a-service' model lessens the maintenance tasks of optimization/tuning that have traditionally fallen to DBAs and ETL developers. There are no servers to manage, software to install, or indexes to tune. This allows data engineers and analysts to focus more exclusively on analytic tasks that will translate into growth for the company.

While Snowflake doesn’t have all the performance optimization bells and whistles of other cloud data warehouse platforms, this is actually a good thing and that most people don't really need all of them or miss them. Using Snowflake on the whole means less knob-turning and futzing with setup/tweaking. Snowflake has its query optimizer already built-in.

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Andrew Goss

Data Engineer

InterfolioInternet, 51-200 employees

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Pros

Multiple availability zones for high assurance of uptime
Both hosted and local management/reporting utilities
Integration with CloudWatch and CloudFormation for automated creation and real-time performance metrics

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Eric Mann

Tekton

ToznyComputer & Network Security, 1-10 employees

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Easy to set up and get running.
Great support.
Integrates well with Amazon AWS.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

Hard to debug performance issues at times since it is a managed service and we don't have all privileges.

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Arjun Komath

Senior Developer

ManageFlitterOnline Media, 11-50 employees

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Charting features could be better.
Reporting tools are not very extensive, creating a need for combining with other tools like Tableau.
Data Warehouse entirely on the cloud might be a problem for some businesses.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

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Snowflake 8.0

Based on 1 answer

SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to

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Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering

Computer Games Company, 51-200 employees

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

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Snowflake 8.9

Based on 10 answers

Snowflake is easy to install/set up; manage the workloads easily using virtual warehouses. Easy Query development.

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Jacob Biguvu

Database Engineer/DBA (Cloud and On-Premises)

Capital OneFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

RDS provides all the features of databases you could host yourself, without all of the maintenance and headaches required, while providing more flexibility and lower TCO.

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Tim Weisbrod

Co-Founder & President

FantasyDraftSports, 11-50 employees

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We use SQL Azure as well. The internal trial of snowflake went so well, that we did not consider any other solution.

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Wicks Justin

Senior Data Engineer

Ignition GroupTelecommunications, 1001-5000 employees

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Return on Investment

Positive - Move to Redshift from Oracle could save us up to 50% annually on database licensing
Positive - Move to Aurora is helping us save on on premise support we pay for mySQL
Negative - still, hard to find a true cost of ownership until several months of use under you're belt

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Verified User

Vice-President in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 10,001+ employees

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It will save the company money by providing a new business solution to data warehousing
Pay as you go allows the company to choose what it wants to pay for and use

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Automotive Company, 10,001+ employees

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Amazon RDS vs Snowflake

Amazon RDS

Snowflake

Pros

Cons

Likelihood to Renew

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Return on Investment

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Additional Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Additional Pricing Details

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