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Snowflake(cloud-only) Data Warehouse: Excellent Performance and Scalability
June 20, 2019

Snowflake(cloud-only) Data Warehouse: Excellent Performance and Scalability

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Snowflake

A few months ago, we'd decided to migrate our on-premise BI stack to cloud as on-premise solutions were not able to meet growing demands. Clearly, we were looking for cloud-only solutions. After extensive research and POC of several tools, we've on-boarded Snowflake. Snowflake is primarily used by the BI developers as our primary data warehouse and the resulting data is used by the whole organization via the dashboard or Excel extracts. Impressive data compression rate and faster data retrieval make it the best choice as an enterprise data warehouse.
  • Impressive data retrieval and data compression ratio.
  • Semi-structured data (JSON, XML) can be loaded as is and retrieved in a tabular structure on the fly using the flatten function.
  • Zero-copy cloning is an excellent feature which saves hours to refresh latest data in development instance.
  • Extensive usages documentation with examples makes development easy.
  • Stored procedures are implemented through JavaScript. Would be an additional overhead if your team doesn't have expertise.
  • No option to run multiple queries and analyze the results set in the same console window.
  • Faster data retrieval makes real time analysis possible.
  • Option to create multiple warehouses enable us to track usages and cost by departments.
  • Option to scale up/down computational warehouse to support peak hours and month end loads makes Snowflake cost effective.
  • Zero-copy cloning reduces storage and deployment cost.
  • Multiple users can access the same amount of data without deadlocks which is a common scenario in relational databases.
  • 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 query plans—plan storage capacity months in advance.
  • Easy to configure new instances, create databases and set up security.
Extensive documentation and several tutorial videos are available online which reduces learning and deployment time. User Interface is very intuitive and provide flexibility to create databases, schema, tables and assign permissions in a few clicks (no need to write SQL queries). SQL History helps to track usages and billing dashboard provide credit breakup per warehouse. Create views and write procedures in JavaScript for more complex data transformation requirement
Snowflake is the data warehouse built for the cloud, enabling the data-driven enterprise with instant elasticity, secure data sharing, and per-second pricing. Faster data retrieval and on the fly retrieval of semi-structured data in tabular format. Excellent data compression ratio. Could be pricey for very large deployments.