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Scalable Cloud Warehouse Tool with Low Cost of Entry and Minimal Staff Training
August 09, 2021

Scalable Cloud Warehouse Tool with Low Cost of Entry and Minimal Staff Training

Michael Sprague | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Snowflake Data Marketplace

Overall Satisfaction with Snowflake

Snowflake is used as the central data warehouse for data coming from all divisions of the College. Once in Snowflake, we use a variety of business intelligence tools to pull the data and do reporting and analysis. It also allows us to spend as we grow our data needs, rather than spending a huge up-front investment.
  • Efficient handling of large data sets in a scalable way
  • Ability to connect from a variety of tools (Tableau, Metabase, JDBC, many more)
  • Querying and output of data in JSON format
  • Built-in query and export tools
  • Security roles and access are hard to understand and manage
  • Rollout of new features seems to heavily favor US West coast, everyone else has to wait
  • Visual interface does not allow you to manage custom functions and routines. For those, it is code only. Management of tables and views is visual.
  • Scalability
  • Cost Controls
  • JSON data
  • SQL-based language
  • Cloud
  • Allowed us to start small and grow rapidly without any software/hardware concerns
  • No negative impacts
  • End result is ability to analyze more data and make smarter business decisions
Azure and Snowflake compared very similarly, but Snowflake provided more options to integrate and connect with tools/companies that were not partners. It seemed to be a more flexible environment. The barrier for entry on Oracle and Google we just too complicated. In particular, working in the Google environment felt like learning an entirely new language and was highly technical. We were up and running with Snowflake in less than a day, without advanced technical knowledge about cloud platforms. Oracle was both complicated and extremely expensive.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Snowflake go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Snowflake again?

Yes

Snowflake is very well suited if your organization wants to start small with minimal investment, and then grow at any pace. It is also good for teams that already know SQL from working on another platform, such as MS SQL Server. It pairs really well with integration tasks because of its native ability to handle JSON data, for both import and querying.

If your tools can only connect by JDBC (no native Snowflake connector) you may have some issues with large data sets. This is really a limitation of using JDBC, not Snowflake, but it is something to be aware of.