Snowflake vs. The Weather Company

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.

Incentivized

Well suited:

• Forecasting for severe weather events.
• Generating overall seasonal trends in upcoming weather patterns.
• Content is easy to read and understand.
• Great for business decision-makers, c-level executives.

Not well-suited:

• Year ahead forecasts.
• Data that can be trusted as finite days before a weather event. The data and forecasts can change often, so remaining up to date is key.

Incentivized

• 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

• Detailed forecasts.
• Hyper-local forecasts.
• Daily updated local and meaningful forecast for our business.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Forecasts are not always accurate.
• Winter weather forecasts are now often now-casted which can be challenging for proactive planning.
• Would love to see more tips on how businesses can prepare for severe weather by the use of the Weather Company’s data.

Incentivized

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

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.

Incentivized

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

Support for the Weather Company has not been an issue. The predictive analytics processes that they use allow them to remain a strong force in the world of weather patterns and forecasts. Brand recognition allows them to continue to grow and develop in a world that is not as crowded as other predictive analytics areas.

Incentivized

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

Insightful meteorologists that both understands the science of weather and also understands our business needs.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Better confidence in the weather forecast.

Incentivized