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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Snowflake

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AThe 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

    Microsoft SQL Server

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft SQL Server is a relational database.

    $1,418

    Per License

    Pricing
    SnowflakeMicrosoft SQL Server
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Subscription
    $1,418.00
    Per License
    Enterprise
    $13,748.00
    Per License
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    SnowflakeMicrosoft SQL Server
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    SnowflakeMicrosoft SQL Server
    Considered Both Products
    Snowflake Computing
    Chose Snowflake
    We had a MS SQL server with over 2 TB of ram & 51 processors that we were using, that could no longer handle our workload. Snowflake can handle 3 times that workload with ease and efficiency.
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    We particularly liked Snowflake's security model as well as its unique storage (whereby everything is essentially a pointer to immutable micro-partitions, which is the key behind its zero-copy cloning, its secure sharing, its time travel, etc.). and also how it separates …
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    Azure and Snowflake compared very similarly, but Snowflake provided more options to integrate and connect with tools/companies that were not partners. It seemed to be a more flexible environment. The barrier for entry on Oracle and Google we just too complicated. In particular, …
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    - Cost was the main aspect on the decision.
    - Performance was in par or better compared to other tools in the market.
    - Snowflake in my opinion stacks better than other tools I have used in the past.
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    Accommodates future data types such as JSON and XML. Scalability is another advantage. Pay per use is beneficial for organizations like yours. Direct connectors with AWS help us to go with it. No limit on user creation and clone data not eating up extra disk space are a few …
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    • Delivered as an easy-to-use data warehouse service, Snowflake enables you to process and analyze all your diverse data, build multiple databases, query with a common robust ANSI SQL environment, and execute ACID transnational capabilities.
    • No need to create indexes and optimize …
    Incentivized
    Microsoft
    Chose Microsoft SQL Server
    Microsoft SQL Server is a comprehensive solution as transactional database, data warehouse, analytics, reporting, and ETL. It also integrates with the cloud well (Azure). The ease of use and setup makes this better than Oracle Database because the query syntax is also different …
    Incentivized
    Chose Microsoft SQL Server
    [Microsoft SQL Server] offers a full solution, Inhouse Applications and hosted application continue to use SQL as backend database. Allows easy creation of development environments and continuous feature release.
    Incentivized
    Chose Microsoft SQL Server
    Amazon Redshift is a cloud-based data warehouse. It does what it says it will do, but my experience is that for a cloud data warehouse, it is a little slow and I'd hope for performance to be insanely fast. Plus, it is also very costly. Same performance for much less cost in …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    30 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    53 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    28 Answers
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    45 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    30 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    53 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    23 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    39 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    25 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    45 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    SnowflakeMicrosoft SQL Server
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Amazon RDS
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    SAP Datasphere
    Score8.6 out of 10
    SingleStore
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SAP Business Data Cloud
    Score8.6 out of 10
    SAP IQ
    Score5.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SnowflakeMicrosoft SQL Server
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (44 ratings)
    7.9
    (107 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    9.0
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    8.8
    (20 ratings)
    7.6
    (17 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.9
    (8 ratings)
    7.9
    (26 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (6 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Data Sharing and Collaboration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (5 ratings)
    Data Sources
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (5 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    SnowflakeMicrosoft SQL Server
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Snowflake Computing
    Snowflake is well suited when you have to store your data and you want easy scalability and increase or decrease the storage per your requirement. You can also control the computing cost, and if your computing cost is less than or equal to 10% of your storage cost, then you don't have to pay for computing, which makes it cost-effective as well.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Microsoft SQL is ubiquitous, while MySQL runs under the hood all over the place. Microsoft SQL is the platform taught in colleges and certification courses and is the one most likely to be used by businesses because it is backed by Microsoft. Its interface is friendly (well, as pleasant as SQL can be) and has been used by so many for so long that resources are freely available if you encounter any issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Easy to configure and use with Visual Studio and Dot Net
    • Easy integration with MSBI to perform data analysis
    • Data Security
    • Easy to understand and use
    • Very easy to export database and tables in the form of SQL query or a script
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Snowflake Computing
    • Add constraints for views and not just for tables
    • Do not force customers to renew for same or higher amount to avoid loosing unused credits. Already paid credits should not expire (at least within a reasonable time frame), independent of renewal deal size.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition has a high cost but is the only edition which supports SQL Always On Availability Groups. It would be nice to include this feature in the Standard version.
    • Licensing of Microsoft SQL Server is a quite complex matter, it would be good to simplify licensing in the future. For example, per core vs per user CAL licensing, as well as complex licensing scenarios in the Cloud and on Edge locations.
    • It would be good to include native tools for converting Oracle, DB2, Postgresql and MySQL/MariaDB databases (schema and data) for import into Microsoft SQL Server.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    We understand that the Microsoft SQL Server will continue to advance, offering the same robust and reliable platform while adding new features that enable us, as a software center, to create a superior product. That provides excellent performance while reducing the hardware requirements and the total cost of ownership of our solution.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Snowflake Computing
    Because the fact that you can query tons of data in a few seconds is incredible, it also gives you a lot of functions to format and transform data right in your query, which is ideal when building data models in BI tools like Power BI, it is available as a connector in the most used BI tools worldwide.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    SQL Server mostly 'just works' or generates error messages to help you sort out the trouble. You can usually count on the product to get the job done and keep an eye on your potential mistakes. Interaction with other Microsoft products makes operating as a Windows user pretty straight forward. Digging through the multitude of dialogs and wizards can be a pain, but the answer is usually there somewhere.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Snowflake Computing
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Its does not have outages.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Snowflake Computing
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    SSAS data cubes may some time slow down your Excel reports.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    We managed to handle most of our problems by looking into Microsoft's official documentation that has everything explained and almost every function has an example that illustrates in detail how a particular functionality works. Just like PowerShell has the ability to show you an example of how some cmdlet works, that is the case also here, and in my opinion, it is a very good practice and I like it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Snowflake Computing
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    It was good
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Snowflake Computing
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    very hands on and detailed training
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Snowflake Computing
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Other than SQL taking quite a bit of time to actually install there are no problems with installation. Even on hardware that has good performance SQL can still take close to an hour to install a typical server with management and reporting services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    [Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Snowflake Computing
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    SQL server does handle growing demands of a mid sized company.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Snowflake Computing
    • With separate compute and storage feature, the queries get executed quickly and it improves our overall productivity.
    • Earlier we were using a different product for analytical purposes, but with Snowflake's in-built analytical feature we are now able to save money.
    • Snowflake is cost efficient, features like auto suspend for compute resources helped to control the costs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Increased accuracy - We went from multiple users having different versions of an Excel spreadsheet to a single source of truth for our reporting.
    • Increased Efficiency - We can now generate reports at any time from a single source rather than multiple users spending their time collating data and generating reports.
    • Improved Security - Enterprise level security on a dedicated server rather than financial files on multiple laptop hard drives.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Snowflake Screenshots

    Screenshot of Snowflake Installation