Google Cloud Spanner vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google Cloud Spanner
Score 6.3 out of 10
N/A
Google Cloud Spanner is a cloud database-as-a-service product offered as a service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).N/A
Snowflake
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
Pricing
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Google Cloud Spanner
7.8
2 Ratings
11% below category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Automatic software patching8.82 Ratings00 Ratings
Database scalability8.82 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated backups10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Database security provisions5.82 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics5.82 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment7.62 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Small Businesses
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.7 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.7 out of 10
Db2
Db2
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.7 out of 10
Db2
Db2
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
7.4
(2 ratings)
9.3
(37 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(13 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(8 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
Google Cloud Spanner is suited for limitless horizontal scaling while maintaining strong consistency which needs to support ACID. NoSQL databases work in scaling but no ACID support. RDBMS support ACID, but horizontal scaling is not as great. The API it provides result in some limitations to related areas of the code, such as connection pools or database linking framework. So high # of connection pools can vary.
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Snowflake Computing
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.
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Pros
Google
  • Super high availability
  • Scales automatically
  • High standard SLA
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Snowflake Computing
  • 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
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Cons
Google
  • Support for Views
  • Support for more databases (schemas).
  • More index types that can be supported (Functional)
  • Backups (ie table/data backup) if data is deleted or truncate by accident.
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Snowflake Computing
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Google
No answers on this topic
Snowflake Computing
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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Usability
Google
No answers on this topic
Snowflake Computing
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.
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Support Rating
Google
No answers on this topic
Snowflake Computing
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Google
At that point, we were looking at something [that] can hold our relational database, [...] provide stable connection, and maintain high ACID transition. BigTable is for nonrelational database so it was out of our [sight] very quickly. BigQuery is a data warehouse that can hold huge amount of data but not ideal for transition. AWS RDS is [...] similar to Spanner but because most of our services are already on GCP, so we went with Spanner.
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Snowflake Computing
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.
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Return on Investment
Google
  • Backups specifically if transactional data is deleted. Restoring made us lose time.
  • Sharding on Horizontal level was quick and easy. Deployment and increasing nodes is easy
  • Large dataset handling.
  • ACID compliance
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Snowflake Computing
  • 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.
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ScreenShots

Snowflake Screenshots

Screenshot of Snowflake Installation