We performed a comparison between Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and Snowflake based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Snowflake had a better user rating regarding ease of deployment and pricing. Both softwares had the same rating when it came to service and support. In terms of features, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics users felt the software had security issues and didn’t feel it was very intuitive. In contrast, users of Snowflake felt the UI needed improvement.
"The initial setup was really easy and straightforward."
"It's feature-rich. It has a wide range of features."
"It's quite quick for querying, even with large datasets, and it's scalable. It's also flexible to use, so it's easy to update and get data quickly without wasting time."
"The architecture, including compute and storage, is good."
"Can capture all the transactional data throughout a company."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability."
"The product is very user friendly."
"Scaling this solution is easy and the uptime is okay."
"From a data warehouse perspective, it's an excellent all-round solution. It's very complete."
"It requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well."
"Working with Parquet files is support out of the box and it makes large dataset processing much easier."
"I like the fact that we don't need a DBA. It automatically scales stuff."
"The product's most important feature is unloading data to S3."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The most valuable features of Snowflake are its performance and power."
"The syntax is advanced which reduces the time to write code."
"I am a researcher. For people to be able to research a solution, there should be at least a free trial. Just advertising a product or saying that this product is better doesn't work. I would strongly recommend providing a lot of free trials and trainings. This will also help Microsoft in having more users or customers. Oracle provides some free trials. You can just go for a free trial and use your database online, which is very good."
"I would like to see them provide the ingestion of images."
"Unfortunately, we have had some issues with the dashboard reporting. Sometimes, the data for specific periods would just appear blank on the dashboard. To investigate this, we worked with a Microsoft incident agent and it turned out to be a result of bugs in the platform when dealing with specific types of queries in Azure Data Factory."
"I would like to see better integration with Active Directory, because we have had problems, and we still do."
"With respect to what needs to be improved, concurrent connectivity has some limitations."
"Indicating what areas need improvement in this solution is a difficult question because the organizations that I am working for are really new in this area. However, an even better more simple interface, or perhaps an extension of a connector app store solution, would be helpful."
"The security performance and cost are the two things that needs improvement."
"They should automate some of the features. There are some things, such as the creation of external tables, that you have to do manually. They should be automated."
"The cost efficiency and monitoring of this solution could be improved. It's easy to spend a lot on Snowflake and it does offer monitoring tools but they're pretty basic."
"The aspect of it that was more complicated was stored procedures. It does not support SQL language-based stored procedures. You have to write in JavaScript. If they supported SQL language and stored procedures, it would make migration from on-prem much simpler. In most cases, if an on-prem solution has stored procedures, they're usually written in SQL. They're not written as what most on-prem DBMS would refer to as an external stored procedure, which is what these feel like to most people because they're written in a language outside of SQL."
"There is room for improvement in Snowflake's integration with Python. We do a lot of SQL programming in Snowflake, but we go to a different tool to program when we have to in Python."
"Room for improvement would be writebacks. It doesn't support extensively writing back to the database, and it doesn't support web applications effectively. Ultimately, it's a database call, so if we are building web applications using Snowflake, it isn't that effective because there is some turnaround time from the database."
"Portability is a big hurdle right now for our clients. Porting all of your existing SQL ecosystem, such as stored procedures, to Snowflake is a major pain point. Currently, Snowflake stored procedures use JavaScript, but they should support SQL-based stored procedures. It would be a huge advantage if you can write your stored procedures using SQL. It seems that they are working on this feature, and they are yet to release it. I remember seeing some notes saying that they were going to do that in the future, but the sooner this feature comes out, it would be better for Snowflake because there are a lot of clients with whom I'm interacting, and their main hurdle is to take their existing Oracle or SQL Server stored procedures and move them into Snowflake. For this, you need to learn JavaScript and how it works, which is not easy and becomes a little tricky. If it supports SQL-based procedures, then you can just cut-paste the SQL code, run it, and easily fix small issues."
"The solution could improve the user interface and add functionality to the system."
"It needs a bit more rigor and governance, which is something you don't get with newer tools. This makes it less enterprise scalable. Its governance and structure can be enhanced, which would really be valuable. I would like to see some kind of prebuilt functionality in terms of having almost like a pre-built data warehouse. A functionality for generating automated kind of pieces would be good."
"Their strategy is just to leverage what you've got and put Snowflake in the middle. It does work well with other tools. You have to buy a separate reporting tool and a separate data loading tool, whereas, in some platforms, these tools are baked in. In the long-term, they'll need to add more direct partnerships to the ecosystem so that it's not like adding on tools around Snowflake to make it work. They can also consider including Snowflake native reporting tools versus partnering with other reporting tools. It would kind of change where they sit in the market."
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is ranked 2nd in Cloud Data Warehouse with 86 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 94 reviews. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is rated 7.8, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics writes "No competitors provide the entire solution to one place ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is most compared with Azure Data Factory, SAP BW4HANA, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Teradata and Amazon Redshift, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and SAP BW4HANA. See our Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Snowflake report.
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