MonetDB is an open source column-oriented relational database management system issued and supported by the Dutch MonetDB development team.
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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.
MonetDB is great when you are performing adhoc queries on a large set of data. For example, if you store data in a typical RDBMS such as MySQL or Postgres and want to join large tables for analytics but the query runs unacceptably slow then MonetDB can act as a second database to offload complex queries. Based on my experience, it may not be a production-ready database since there aren't many DBAs familiar with it and due to lack of documentation, maintenance can become a little tricky.
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
This is an open source software so there are obvious drawbacks, the biggest of which is a lack of documentation.
MonetDB does not seem to be well known outside of the academic environment so there is less information when you are searching for answers of any type.
I'd like to see more use cases and/or best practices so that commercial companies like ours can optimally use all of its highly performant features.
The code is written in C/C++ and this can be negative if you are a mainly java-shop and need UDF - User Defined Function.
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
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.
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 have used Five9 in my previous company but on a much smaller scale. It was more expensive, however we were using it for a max of 50 employees, now we need a much bigger platform. We also used Five9 for other things, like phone dialers etc. so it was a little different.
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.
If you are familiar with a general database concept and played with open source products before then MonetDB will give you immediate return in terms of productivity since developers can quickly develop and verify their test cases involving back-end database with a large sample data set.
There is a stiff learning curve due to lack of documentation and sparse information available on the internet.
Overall experience has been positive since MonetDB gives you another option when it comes to building out a data warehouse.
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.
