Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Your upcoming app can be built faster on a fully managed SQL database and can be moved into Azure with a few to no application code changes. Flexible and responsive server less computing and Hyperscale storage can cope with your changing requirements and one of the main benefits is the reduction in costs, which is noticeable.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review Maintenance is always an issue, so using a cloud solution saves a lot of trouble. On premise solutions always suffer from fragmented implementations here and there, where several "dba's" keep track of security and maintenance. With a cloud database it's much easier to keep a central overview. Security options in SQL database are next level... data masking, hiding sensitive data where always neglected on premise, whereas you'll get this automatically in the cloud. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review One needs to be aware that some T-SQL features are simply not available. The programmatic access to server, trace flags, hardware from within Azure SQL Database is taken away (for a good reason). No SQL Agent so your jobs need to be orchestrated differently. The maximum concurrent logins maybe an unexpected problem. Sudden disconnects. The developers and admin must study the capacity and tier usage limits https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-subscription-service-limits otherwise some errors or even transaction aborts never seen before can occur. Only one Latin Collation choice. There is no way to debug T-SQL ( a big drawback in my point of view). Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review This is best solution as a DBA one could expect from a service provider and as a cloud service, it removes all your hassles.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review We give the support a high rating simply because every time we've had issues or questions, representatives were in contact with us quickly. Without fail, our issues/questions were handled in a timely matter. That kind of response is integral when client data integrity and availability is in question. There is also a wealth of documentation for resolving issues on your own.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We moved away from Oracle and NoSQL because we had been so reliant on them for the last 25 years, the pricing was too much and we were looking for a way to cut the cord.
Snowflake is just too up in the air, feels like it is soon to be just another line item to add to your Azure subscription. Azure was just priced right, easy to migrate to and plenty of resources to hire to support/maintain it. Very easy to learn, too.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Perfect for small and medium databases, being very cost effective. As a Platform as a Service, there is no concern about patches, upgrades and end of life. Be aware of security and network capabilities. The service cannot run in the VNET as Azure Virtual Machines do. Read full review ScreenShots