Is Snowflake really nirvana for data warehousing?
January 05, 2021

Is Snowflake really nirvana for data warehousing?

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
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

It's easy to scale up/down or expand/shrink. However, without any tuning capabilities in SQL, more materialization of the data needs to be done to use the database cost effectively. It is time to look into other services that don't charge arm and leg. Customer service is slow to respond.