Is Snowflake really nirvana for data warehousing?
January 05, 2021
Is Snowflake really nirvana for data warehousing?
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Snowflake
Snowflake was chosen as our data warehouse to replace Amazon Redshift. It is used by all areas of the company including data science, product teams, sales, marketing, operations, finance, executives, etc. It sources data from various cloud data sources and is being fed from integration tools (Fivetran, Stitch) or ETL (Matillion).
- Can scale up or across depending on workload type
- Separation of compute and storage
- Query Profiler gives you a pictorial idea of where the query is spending time
- Very expensive
- Needs to compute more to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver the data (needs to know your access patterns)
- Query history is tricky to play with and system catalog views are either nonexistent or not well designed
- Users are more inclined to run their reports
- Most tools on the market readily support Snowflake
- Snowflake is building many integrations so the integrations can be done using built-in tools
Redshift compute and storage can be scaled up/down together (though they added some features recently, they don't quite add up). I haven't tried Avalanche or Firebolt but would love to in the near future, due to their pedigree or revolutionary billing methods.
Do you think Snowflake delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with Snowflake's feature set?
Yes
Did Snowflake live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Snowflake go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Snowflake again?
Yes