Snowflake Review

I work for a company that are Snowflake partners and help clients implement solutions using Snowflake.

Snowflake solves many of the challenges that traditional data warehousing tools have such as a lack of agility, scalability and fine-tuning.

The use of micropartitions and metadata means that there is very little management needed and the user can focus purely on actually getting value out of their data. In addition, the cloning feature makes problem resolution and cutover extremely pain-free.

Whilst flexibility is one of its key strengths, it would be useful if there could be some better governance built into the product. In addition, functionality out of the box to deal with common data warehousing scenarios (e.g. slowly-changing dimensions etc.) would be great.

I have been using Snowflake for about a year and a half.

It is extremely stable.

The support from Snowflake is absolutely great. All kinds of content and things are available to support yourself as well as to be able to talk through issues and have their engineers take a look at the problems. They are very responsive.

We use Snowflake alongside other data warehousing tools. Ultimately it depends on what the client wants to implement and their existing architecture as to what would be the best choice.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

Snowflake has a very efficient pricing mechanism where you only pay for what you use by the second making it very easy to control costs.

The best advice I would give is to push for a POC. Pick a couple of use cases where you think you could quickly get value and just see how quickly you can get it implemented. One of the key features of Snowflake is that you can get it up and running straight away.