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Snowflake Review

Good performance, straightforward to set up, and there is flexibility in pricing

Oct 06 2020

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What is our primary use case?

Snowflake is used for very large data, such as in the case where tables might contain 600 to 700 million records.

What is most valuable?

It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient.

The pricing and licensing model is good.

What needs improvement?

Snowflake has support for stored procedures, but it is not that powerful. They have a lot of limitations. For example, it is really basic and there are limitations on subqueries.

The functions are not very good. Improving this would help to make sure data manipulation much easier. Right now, the inbuilt stored procedures and functions are all Java-based.

For how long have I used the solution?

I Have been using SnowFlake for about five months.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have approximately 10 people in the organization who are using Snowflake.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support is very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We use Snowflake in conjunction with Matillion, which is another AWS-based ETL tool. It is being used as a bridge between our on-premises data and Snowflake.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply log in and start using it.

When it comes to deployment, you can choose between the AWS and Azure cloud. We chose AWS.

What about the implementation team?

It is easy to create an instance and you can do it yourself if you have an AWS account. Snowflake will give you the connection ID and other relevant details.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is flexible in that, for example, if I run a query and it is slow then I can increase the processing power while it is still running, and they charge more for the time. The cost is on a per-query basis.

If you're running with a base processor, called a warehouse, the query might cost 1.0 cents. But, if my query is slow and I want to increase the speed, the next level adds a little more cost to that.

On average, with the number of queries that we run, we pay approximately $200 USD per month.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Recently, we have been doing a review of Redshift. However, we finally decided to go with Snowflake.

What other advice do I have?

My advice for anybody who is considering Snowflake is that it is a really good product, especially if you are having issues with Big Data. It is not good for a typical OLTP environment, such as a small table.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.