Amazon RDS vs Snowflake

Amazon RDS

Amazon RDS is well suited if you need a highly-available, cloud-hosted, scalable database for websites or web applications. It can grow to serve as many queries as you need (at a cost) and is easy to configure. That being said, RDS can get expensive quickly depending on your use. If you're hosting a simple website or blog, it would be cheaper to stand up a database inside the EC2 instance powering the application. If you're not working with a lot of data, RDS can potentially be overkill for your needs.

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Eric Mann

Tekton

ToznyComputer & Network Security, 1-10 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

Zero manual configuration, you can get an instance up and running in just 5 minutes.
High scalability (RDS simplifies setting up master-slave cluster) and reliability (Multi AZ replications).
Automatic backups so that we don't have to worry about losing data.

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Arjun Komath

Senior Developer

ManageFlitterOnline Media, 11-50 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

Currently RDS does not offer a No-SQL DB management through RDS. They have their DynamoDB offering for No-SQL, but I wish RDS offers popular No-SQL DB's like MongoDB in their offerings.
RDS does not provide access to the Virtual Machine. It provides access to the database instance but not to the VM that Database resides in. This is kind of a nice to have as it would allow for fine grained performance tuning of the DB.
Unifying RDS security by combining instance security model with AWS IAM model. Currently to manage an RDS instance you have to have two security models in place, one, to secure access to RDS through IAM and the other to secure access to the Database through the Database's own security.

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Anudeep Palanki

Application Developer

Monsanto CompanyFarming, 10,001+ 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

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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

Redshift is massively scalable but has some limitations that we weren't willing to accept (no JSONB). It also has its own distinct flavor of SQL, and there isn't as much content online about Redshift's flavor of SQL versus postgres'. In the end, we just didn't need to kind of scale that redshift was designed for, so we went for RDS, because it was cheaper and simpler.

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Valeri Karpov

Software Engineer

Booster FuelsTransportation/Trucking/Railroad, 11-50 employees

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Snowflake offers great customer support when compared to most other Software as a Service data warehouses. Moreover, having a data warehouse built entirely on the cloud makes it easier for teams working across different geographical locations to integrate their work. Additionally, Snowflake is also priced better when compared to other warehousing services.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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