Item: Snowflake
Rating: 10
Author: Torrey Vegter

Overall Satisfaction with Snowflake

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Snowflake on our Data Engineering team to house our data warehouse and offload a substantial amount of our ETL processes to Snowflake. Snowflake enables us to offer ultra-fast querying to the business to quickly gain insights into our current data set.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Extremely intuitive and easy to use querying language.
Allows high performance querying of large data sets with very little setup and configuration.
Interfaces very easily with AWS S3.
Works seamlessly with both structured and unstructured data sets.
Very granular security.

Cons

IDE is OK but can be a bit clunky given it's web-based.

Return on Investment

We have been able to offload our nightly ETL jobs to run on Snowflake which has cut the time down from hours to minutes.
Our data engineers have been able to focus more on development rather than query optimization has given Snowflake's out-of-box high performance.

Support Rating

I've only had to deal with them once. They were responsive and helped me clear up the issue although it took a day or two longer than I would have preferred.

Key Insights

Do you think Snowflake delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Snowflake's feature set?

Yes

Did Snowflake live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Snowflake go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Snowflake again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake works extremely well for storing a data warehouse as the querying is optimized for larger tables that are filled in batches. It also works extremely well with unstructured data and has basically replaced any need we previously had for NoSQL databases. Snowflake does not perform well for transactional databases.

Comments

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Amazing cloud-based DB