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The best data warehouse on the market
April 25, 2019

The best data warehouse on the market

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Snowflake

We use Snowflake across our entire organization. We selected Snowflake to replace Redshift as our data warehouse. All of our data now funnels into Snowflake and users are able to query it and draw insights that they have never had before. Additionally, we were able to build and release a reporting dashboard for our external clients to see all of their historical data with us in one place.
  • You only pay for the resources when you are using them
  • ANSI SQL compliant
  • Great documentation
  • Native Apache Spark connector
  • Does not support Dynamic SQL
  • Right now you can write User-Defined Functions (UDFs) in pure SQL or Javascript. I would love to see support for something like Python
  • We have been seeing more downtime lately as of writing this review
  • As an engineer, I don't see as much of the financial impact. I do know at least 10 customers have signed with us specifically after seeing the dashboards/insights they would get from our Snowflake data warehouse.
I evaluated Redshift and Panoply when making the choice for Snowflake. Panoply is built on Redshift, so the two are equal in drawbacks: Redshift requires a cluster to be running 24/7 for your data to live there. We produce terabytes of data every day, so this was not an option for us. Snowflake separates the cost of compute resources and storage. We pay $23/TB/month in storage costs, and whatever we use in compute.
Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS), Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), MySQL
If you know SQL, you already know all there is to know about Snowflake. They have a great web interface with syntax highlighting, saved queries, etc. Additionally, their programmatic connectors are very easy to install and use. As someone who is coming from Redshift and Apache Spark, reading/writing data to the data warehouse is infinitely easier with Snowflake than Redshift.
Snowflake is great as a data warehouse for any sized company. Since you only pay for what you use, you can request fewer resources if you are on a smaller budget.

The only time I would say Snowflake is not the right option is when you are not using one of their supported languages. My team works in Python and Spark, so we have no issue connecting to the DB. Other teams at my company use PHP, which does not have a 1st-party connector yet (it is in private preview), so they will have to use a workaround for now.