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Cloud-Based Data Warehousing Done Right
May 05, 2019

Cloud-Based Data Warehousing Done Right

Carlos Fares, CBIP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Snowflake

We replaced our RDS Postgres based DW with Snowflake. We use it as the main data source for all analytics components within our SaaS product, internal reporting, and ad hoc analysis by power users. We are now also able to analyze JSON without the need for transformation by easily replicating S3 buckets with Snowpipe.
  • Provision compute resources instantly and autoscaling. True elastic, pay as you go pricing model.
  • Secure Data Sharing. No other vendor offers this. This is big if you have the need to do a lot of data extracts.
  • Ability to segregate clusters of computer resources (warehouses) by use pool. You can give power users access without the fear of slowing down critical applications.
  • Cloud first architecture offers simple integration with other cloud-centric technologies/tools like S3 storage, streaming/replication brokers like Kafka, Alooma and cloud base BI tools.
  • Big Data analytics capabilities with the familiarity of ANSI SQL. Short learning curve.
  • Compilation times on somewhat complex queries is high. We use materialized views to address this problem and take advantage of caching, but we believe there is room for improvement here.
  • SLA's dependent on the big cloud player (AWS, Azure, GCP). If they have interruptions, you have interruptions. This is the current reality of cloud computing.
  • Cost and performance vs our previous DW are several times better.
  • Shorter development cycles are possible based on the ability to easily ingest and query semi-structured data.
  • Data sharing capability can be a catalyst for new products.
Instant provisioning of computing resources and data sharing is something we have not seen with any other vendor. Being HIPAA compliant at the time of evaluation was a must for us. Other vendors were late on this. Onboarding on support during implementation was also excellent.
If you are coming from the SQL world and know your way around cloud service like AWS, you would feel right at home. There are some new things to learn but it is a new tool after all. The latest version of the Web Interface is much better. Well done. They have also made solid progress with the user community forum and documentation. We usually find all answers there.
Snowflake is an analytics data store. If your main use case for evaluating it is analytics workload, then there is no reason to at least do a POC. If your workload is more transactional, real-time log analytics or search, then there are other options.