Exasol, from the company of the same name in Nuremberg, is presented by the vendor as a high-performance in-memory analytics database that aims to transform how organizations works with data, on-premises, in the cloud or both.
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Snowflake
Score 9.0 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.
Exasol is suited to applications requiring fewer & larger queries (reporting/data analytics/business intelligence tools). Its per-query overhead makes it unsuitable as an operational database (those are optimized for many & smaller queries.)
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.
We have found Exasol to be very fast at summarizing large data sets. It has been a great backend for both reporting tools and data analytics/business intelligence. Combined with the fact that data import is also very fast it makes it ideal for a real-time ELT architecture.
Exasol is low maintenance. No indexes to maintain (The database auto-manages them) and very little tuning is required.
Query processing is optimized for high throughput and high parallelization. This means that even under high loads performance degrades gracefully as opposed to having "pile-ups" and "meltdowns". This has made it a very reliable database for us.
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
Exasol doesn't have some of the advanced enterprise-y features found in some other large corporate database systems (e.g. native row-level and column-level security). However it's pretty customizable (SQL pre-processing, virtual schemas, powerful user-defined-function frameworks) so many of these features can be implemented manually.
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
I gave it 9/10 instead of 10/10 only because it lacks in a few advanced enterprise features that require manual workarounds. Otherwise our users have had no problem getting up to speed with it (other than SQL syntax issues that are specific to it, but that's true of any DB)
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 had only positive experiences with their support. They are fast, knowledgeable, and courteous. Online support requests get picked up within hours. I've only once had to use their hotline and that was for an emergency. There was even one minor non-security bug report that I reported and which they fixed in the following week's minor release. I was quite impressed.
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.
We looked at some others too, but was 5 yrs ago so I don't recall the list. Exasol had the best performance per cost, outstanding performance, and was easy to evaluate. Even their community addition running on my laptop was faster than our existing reporting solution.
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.
When we first migrated to Exasol (from a MySQL-backed reporting tool) our clients spent over an order of magnitude less time waiting on reports and since then it has opened up possibilities for reporting and analyzing data that were simply not possible beforehand.
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.
