Extremely fast and efficient data warehouse tool.
July 31, 2019

Extremely fast and efficient data warehouse tool.

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

Overall Satisfaction with Snowflake

Snowflake was implemented around 6 months ago to replace Redshift as the SQL level that allows us to query our data. Snowflake enables us to query our data quickly and effectively to get insights into various aspects of the program as well as various aspects of our users' behavior. It allows us to make smarter business decisions by making that data more readily available and reliable than our previous solution was.

Pros

  • Resources that scale up and down automatically to ensure that queries run quickly and efficiently without paying for computing power that is not being used
  • Much more reliable than our previous software
  • No noticable limit to query size
  • Runs very quickly

Cons

  • The SQL syntax used is different from Redshift in a number of ways. Would be nice to have more readily available help documentation around the differences built into the system.
  • Would be awesome of there was a way to see relations between tables more effectively.
  • Much more reliable access to data encourages more people to utilize what is available.
  • Quicker queries means that you can get data much more quickly.
  • Queries no longer have a limit in size since the computing power scales up with the size of the query meaning that the types of things we're able to look for has significantly expanded.
  • On the downside, this is definitely more expensive than our previous software.
For us our previous solution in this space was Redshift which we found to be much less reliable and was hardware capped. There may very well be cloud options that our company just wasn't utilizing. For us, queries constantly ran out of memory and failed. Even when they didn't outright fail, they took significantly longer to run. Overall the switch to Snowflake has been awesome and we've definitely increased our efficiency when it comes to accessing our data.
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.
Snowflake is great when you need to store large amounts of data while retaining the ability to query that data quickly. It is very reliable and allows for auto-scaling on large queries meaning that you're only paying for the power you actually use. It's taken queries that took 20+ minutes to run on redshift down to 2 minutes on Snowflake.

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