Databox, headquartered in Cambridge, offers Databox Designer, an application allowing enterprise level users to track and share KPIs from key applications, touting a no code setup and an API and query tools for integration with custom data sources and data searches.
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Snowflake
Score 8.9 out of 10
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The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the eponymous data warehouse with, from the company in San Mateo, a cloud and SQL based DW that aims to allow users to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data in secure, governed, and compliant ways. With it, users can securely access the Data Cloud to share live data with customers and business partners, and connect with other organizations doing business as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers.
I believe Databox can be an asset for any company. We are a small company, but I can see the value for large companies too. Databox is a great fit for departments or organizations that need to put their data into a readable form without needing a ton of reports. Databox allows you to save time and put together a nice report without having to do too much extra work. Once it is set up, it basically runs on its own at the frequency you set. I personally receive a daily report and have it sent to the respective people on the day of our meeting so we can quickly review it.
I am over our HR data, and we use Workday for our HR management system. I have a script in place that runs reports on Workday and saves the results as CSVs. I can then use stages in Snowflake to insert these CSVs into Snowflake, then I can insert or truncate and replace these staged tables into a final schema. Then once these are in a schema I can reference them and build out my data models. In addition to ingesting CSVs, Snowflake has the ability to write a CSV file to our Amazon S3 bucket. Ingesting these CSVs, transforming the data, then delivering it to a destination would've involved so much more coding than my current process if we were on any other platform.
Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs
Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources
Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors
Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time
Snowflake offers online training for various employee types
Some types of data can only be reported on for 1-2 months back. Unless I'm misunderstanding the function of the software this seems really weird. I can't figure out how to report on Activities more than 2 months ago
This tool is very much technical and proper knowledge is required, so mostly you have to hire an IT team.
I wish if various videos could be available for basic quires like its initiation, then I think it would act as a guideline and would help the beginners a lot.
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
Databox is an intuitive, well-designed platform that can be used by non-technical marketers. It is easy to learn, and while set up takes time, usability is high and the team has enjoyed creating custom dashboards and clients have also given us great feedback regarding its usability and value. While other BI tools are much more complex to navigate, Databox is a breeze.
The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database.
I have really enjoyed using Databox and have seen the value of it in many ways. They also continue to improve the functions of it and grow their integrations and templates. I look forward to continuing to use Databox in the future, potentially even finding ways to incorporate it into other departments to help them with reporting as well.
We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information.
Databox is unique in its ability to report from multiple data sources. Google Analytics is the standard when it comes to web metrics, but it's just one of the tools that integrates with Databox. Tableau is fantastic for data visualizations and reporting, but it's much more expensive than Databox, so it's not ideal for everyone. Tableau is also superior with customization
I have had the experience of using one more database management system at my previous workplace. What Snowflake provides is better user-friendly consoles, suggestions while writing a query, ease of access to connect to various BI platforms to analyze, [and a] more robust system to store a large amount of data. All these functionalities give the better edge to Snowflake.
Positive impact: we use Snowflake to track our subscription and payment charges, which we use for internal and investor reporting
Positive impact: 3 times faster query speed compared to Treasure Data means that answers to stakeholders can be delivered quicker by analysts
Positive impact: recommender systems now source their data from Snowflake rather than Spark clusters, improving development speed, and no longer require maintainence of Spark clusters.
