We performed a comparison between IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud and Snowflake based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Cloud Data Warehouse."The performance is okay as long as the volume of queries is not too high."
"The way that it scales will help a lot of customers that are stuck with Netezza boxes that can't grow any larger."
"It will be MPP, so performance should improve."
"The most valuable feature is the snapshot database. In one second, you can just take a snapshot of the database for test purposes."
"It is a very good platform. It can handle structured and semi-structured data, and it can be used for your data warehouse or data lake. It can load and deal with any data that you have. It can extract data from an on-premises database or a website and make it available in the cloud. It has very fast implementation and integration as compared to other solutions. There is no need for the DBA to manage or do the day-to-day DBA tasks, which is one of the greatest things about it."
"It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."
"The feature that is really striking is the ability to translate the SQL workloads into the NoSQL version that can be used by Snowflake."
"This solution has helped our organization by being easy to maintain and having good technical support."
"Can be leveraged with respect to better performance, auto tuning and competition."
"The features I found most valuable with this solution are sharing options and built-in time zone conversion."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"Ultimately, the product itself has challenges and we are not currently satisfied with the support, either."
"Tech support for dashDB is awful. We usually have tickets open for three to four weeks."
"Containers get corrupted very easily. Restoring them using GPFS can result in a lot of issues."
"Right now, we are implementing on ESX VMware 6.0. Support for this platform is poor. Also, one of the backup/recovery options is broken and IBM is not addressing the issue."
"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway."
"Snowflake has support for stored procedures, but it is not that powerful."
"Support needs improvement, as it can take several days before you get some initial support."
"There are three things that came to my notice. I am not very sure whether they have already done it. The first one is very specific to the virtual data warehouse. Snowflake might want to offer industry-specific models for the data warehouse. Snowflake is a very strong product with credit. For a typical retail industry, such as the pharma industry, if it can get into the functional space as well, it will be a big shot in their arm. The second thing is related to the migration from other data warehouses to Snowflake. They can make the migration a little bit more seamless and easy. It should be compatible, well-structured, and well-governed. Many enterprises have huge impetus and urgency to move to Snowflake from their existing data warehouse, so, naturally, this is an area that is critical. The third thing is related to the capability of dealing with relational and dimensional structures. It is not that friendly with relational structures. Snowflake is more friendly with the dimensional structure or the data masks, which is characteristic of a Kimball model. It is very difficult to be savvy and friendly with both structures because these structures are different and address different kinds of needs. One is manipulation-heavy, and the other one is read-heavy or analysis-heavy. One is for heavy or frequent changes and amendments, and the other one is for frequent reads. One is flat, and the other one is distributed. There are fundamental differences between these two structures. If I were to consider Snowflake as a silver bullet, it should be equally savvy on both ends, which I don't think is the case. Maybe the product has grown and scaled up from where it was."
"The scheduling system can definitely be better because we had to use external airflow for that. There should be orchestration for the scheduling system. Snowflake currently does not support machine learning, so it is just storage. They also need some alternatives for SQL Query. There should also be support for Spark in different languages such as Python."
"There are some stored procedures that we've had trouble with. The solution also needs to fine-tune the connectors to be able to connect into the system source."
"They need to improve its ETL functionality so that Snowflake becomes an ETL product. Snowpipe can do some pipelines and data ingestion, but as compare to Talend, these functionalities are limited. The ETL feature is not good enough. Therefore, Snowflake can only be used as a database. You can't use it as an ETL tool, which is a limitation. We have spoken to the vendor, and they said they are working on it, but I'm not sure when they will bring it to production."
"I see room for improvement when it comes to credit performance. The other thing I'd like to be improved is the warehouse facility."
IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud is ranked 15th in Cloud Data Warehouse while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 92 reviews. IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud is rated 7.6, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud writes "The "prefetch" feature anticipates needed data and keeps it available. BLU acceleration determines what data is unqualified for analysis and skips it". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud is most compared with Amazon Redshift, IBM Netezza Performance Server, IBM Db2 Warehouse and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and AWS Lake Formation.
See our list of best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors and best Data Warehouse vendors.
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