Amazon RDS vs Snowflake

Amazon RDS

Amazon Relational Database Service is best for situations where you need to use a MariaDB or MySQL Database, but do not want to spend time setting up and securing the server/software. Amazon Relational Database Service manages all of this for you, so it is very easy to get up and running and have an enterprise-ready environment ready for use.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Internet Company, 51-200 employees

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Snowflake

Snowflake is great in quick process and ad hoc queries of JSON files (with built-in JSON support). Snowflake would not be the best alternative for sitting on top of Tableau Dashboards - mostly because of the engine being idle and filtering might take additional time. The fact that you only pay for engine time you actually use makes Snowflake is very cost-effective.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering

Computer Games Company, 51-200 employees

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Pros

Redundency
Managed Updates
Security
Unified billing

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Internet Company, 51-200 employees

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Process Engine control - we can stop/pause/start engines for various tasks.
Processing speed is adequate unless there are many users on at the same time.
Web interface is easy and intuitive, like the fact that your queries are automatically saved in tabs.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering

Computer Games Company, 51-200 employees

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Cons

Unable to run custom software on RDS servers
Customer support is lackluster
Price

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Internet Company, 51-200 employees

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Very limited amount of tabs - saved queries, which requires us to store the code somewhere else and re-use existing queries.
Performance can really be a problem if there are many users on the system at the same time.
SnowFlake support sometimes can be hard to reach.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering

Computer Games Company, 51-200 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

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Snowflake8.0

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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Alternatives Considered

Honestly, there aren't a lot of great alternatives to RDS, and most likely the real alternative is just running an instance on your local box. While lots of other services (like Rackspace) offer hosted database solutions, RDS in my opinion, is the clear winner on price, availability, and failover support

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Justin Schroeder

Full Stack Engineer

Braid, LLCMarketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees

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Snowflake is cheaper, but TreasureData has a better interface and much more functionality. Also, TreasureData is able to process a greater number of records more efficiently. TreasureData has the ability to run both Hive and Presto. Also, TreasureData has native APIs for many various products, as well as native SDKs. We are currently using both of them for various things.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering

Computer Games Company, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

A very positive ROI, since RDS effectively replaces the wasteful Infrastructure teams for small scaled organizations. Since, with RDS you pay for what you use, its a lot more efficient than paying rent and maintaining data centers for the resources you might not always need.
The side effect of moving to RDS is allocating budgets. In Pre-SaaS era, its very difficult to answer the question, how much does a project needs to pay for infrastructure, but with moving to RDS, we could allocate cost centers allocated for the project to each instance and we could get fine-grained cost allocations.

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Anudeep Palanki

Application Developer

Monsanto CompanyFarming, 10,001+ employees

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