Azure Blob Storage vs Snowflake

Likelihood to Recommend

For cold backups, archive data, and if you need cheap online storage that will not be regularly accessed. Also very good for streaming videos or audio files, for example, if you have an online education portal, you can store all the video files in Blob storage and then just load them on your website. The same applies for storing website content, pdfs, etc.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Automotive Company, 201-500 employees

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Specific scenarios where Snowflake is very strong include analytical data processing scenarios. Snowflake is wonderful at inexpensively consolidating and storing data and allowing very fast access to that data while maintaining a low cost profile with it's ability to automatically resume and suspend virtual warehouses. Snowflake is less suited to transaction processing scenarios and isn't a best choice to back up an online order processing system.

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Brian Bickell

Data Practice Director

InterWorksInformation Services, 201-500 employees

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Pros

Reduced cost. We were able to reduce our storage infrastructure by several hundred terabytes by consolidating redundant copies and dedupe/compression on files.
Extremely high level of redundancy. We can replicate data in a variety of ways that we would never have been capable of on our own hardware.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Civil Engineering Company, 501-1000 employees

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Resources that scale up and down automatically to ensure that queries run quickly and efficiently without paying for computing power that is not being used
Much more reliable than our previous software
No noticable limit to query size
Runs very quickly

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Jake Schlingman

Product Manager

AppFolio, Inc.Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees

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Cons

One thing we wish was done better is more guidance for building it out from day one. We did not know what we were doing and until we hired an implementation person that understood what we wanted to do. We spent a lot of time and money doing things over several times.
Help customers hook up with talented (local) implementation specialists would be great.

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Richard Peterson

Global Webmaster

Broan-NuToneConsumer Goods, 1001-5000 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

No answers on this topic

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

No answers on this topic

Snowflake 8.7

Based on 11 answers

Extensive documentation and several tutorial videos are available online which reduces learning and deployment time. User Interface is very intuitive and provide flexibility to create databases, schema, tables and assign permissions in a few clicks (no need to write SQL queries). SQL History helps to track usages and billing dashboard provide credit breakup per warehouse. Create views and write procedures in JavaScript for more complex data transformation requirement

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Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Consumer Goods Company, 51-200 employees

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Support Rating

Azure Blob Storage 8.4

Based on 6 answers

Documentation sometimes appears to be out of date or not fully documented properly with new releases. It is like documentation comes out for a specific version and is quickly out of date. Another issue is documentation is scarce on new releases and only seems to get properly updated (and sometimes is still wrong) once enough people hit the forums to complain.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Information Technology & Services Company, 11-50 employees

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Snowflake 8.7

Based on 10 answers

Overall, the support from Snowflake has been very good. Since we are one of the major users for Snowflake and have a dedicated tech team to solve all the technical problem on our way. On the side of the technical problem, any sql related questions can be found from everywhere online.

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Verified User

Analyst in Corporate

Cosmetics Company, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

Azure Blob is the only major cloud object storage platform that we use today.

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Michael Ward

Sr Systems Administrator

USIInsurance, 5001-10,000 employees

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The average percentage of time that a data warehouse is actually doing something is around 20%. Given this, the price by query estimate becomes an important pricing consideration. For this, Snowflake crucially decouples of storage and compute. With Snowflake you pay for 1) storage space used and 2) amount of time spent querying data. Snowflake also has a notion of a “logical warehouse” which is the “compute” aspect of the database. These warehouses can be scaled up or down to deliver different grades of performance. You can also configure the number of compute nodes to parallelize query execution. These warehouses can be configured to “pause” when you’re not using them for cost efficiency. As a result, you can have a super beefy warehouse for BI queries that’s only running when people are using your BI tools, while your background batch jobs can use cheaper hardware.

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Andrew Goss

Data Engineer

InterfolioInternet, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Azure Blob Storage is just way cheaper than anything we could afford to do on-prem. Forecasting spend is way easier with predictable growth than it is with large capital expenditures every few years, and that ability to grow or shrink dynamically is simplifies things.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Civil Engineering Company, 501-1000 employees

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Quick installation/setup for a data warehouse solution.
Make easy to handle/manage the various type of semi-structured data using the native solutions and provided new data modeling concepts such as schema-read data model and schema-write data model.
Make easy and simplified the workload management using virtual warehouses and materialized views.

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Jacob Biguvu

Database Engineer/DBA (Cloud and On-Premises)

Capital OneFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Azure Blob Storage Editions & Modules

Edition

Block Blobs	$0.0081¹
Azure Data Lake Storage	$0.0081¹
Managed Discs	$1.54²
Files	$0.058³

per GB/per month
per month
per GB/per month

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Snowflake Editions & Modules

Edition

US East	$20.00¹

Per TB

Additional Pricing Details

—