Your data team will love Snowflake, just be sure to manage cost
Updated June 05, 2023
Your data team will love Snowflake, just be sure to manage cost
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Snowflake
Our company has grown organically and by acquisition, and as a result we have a series of disparate software products with around 800 databases across different clouds and different databases - SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, AWS, Azure, etc.
My challenge was to implement an awesome and consistent reporting suite that allowed customers full access to all of their data across all of our products. While the software development team is working on integrating all these disparate products, that's a significant multi-year challenge.
Implementing a data lake in Snowflake greatly empowered my team to make tremendous reporting, blending data from many sources, without adding any load to the transactional databases. What's more, Snowflake has a vast array of excellent built-in features such as row-level security, data masking, secure sharing, and other items that allowed us to push security right down to the database level so we secure data no matter how customers access it, without relying on complex where clauses, etc., in queries.
The Snowflake model of separating compute from storage and allowing us to have differing workloads for differing usage scenarios is also very helpful.
My challenge was to implement an awesome and consistent reporting suite that allowed customers full access to all of their data across all of our products. While the software development team is working on integrating all these disparate products, that's a significant multi-year challenge.
Implementing a data lake in Snowflake greatly empowered my team to make tremendous reporting, blending data from many sources, without adding any load to the transactional databases. What's more, Snowflake has a vast array of excellent built-in features such as row-level security, data masking, secure sharing, and other items that allowed us to push security right down to the database level so we secure data no matter how customers access it, without relying on complex where clauses, etc., in queries.
The Snowflake model of separating compute from storage and allowing us to have differing workloads for differing usage scenarios is also very helpful.
- Security
- Scaling
- Support
- Separating compute from storage
- Flexible disparate compute models
- Detailed history of all your queries and activity, for analysis/review/troubleshooting
- Cloning, undeletion, sharing - all tied to how Snowflake stores data
- There is no support for triggers
- Materialised views are limited to only one table
- You can't create dynamic SQL in functions
- Security - role-based access control, row-level policies, data masking
- Cloud agnostic - we can put it in any cloud, any region, so it lives where our apps/data is
- The support is very good; you can ask questions and get detailed, helpful answers
- The ability to review activity/usage, and look at any and all past queries is tremendously helpful for debugging and analysis
- Snowflake has accelerated our ability to offer a single reporting solution that blends many disparate databases together
- There is a need, however, to carefully monitor costs. It's easy to bring costs up significantly through larger compute warehouses than needed, or by scaling too soon, or by not pairing the warehouse with the workload appropriately
- We have had some difficulty finding the best tools to ingest data into Snowflake from all our sources, and it must be remembered there is a cost to this element also
We particularly liked Snowflake's security model as well as its unique storage (whereby everything is essentially a pointer to immutable micro-partitions, which is the key behind its zero-copy cloning, its secure sharing, its time travel, etc.). and also how it separates compute allowing many different warehouses of different sizes for different purposes.
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 Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
The base tier includes 24x7 support, and there is no higher support tier (as best as I know), besides support from the account management team which you get on a contract.
Snowflake helped us solve a problem with a different vendor without it going into a spiral of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team provided such tremendously detailed and helpful insights into what that vendor's product was doing (via its SQL queries to Snowflake) that we could go back to that vendor and get the problem solved quickly. It was a great support experience.