We performed a comparison between IBM Db2 Warehouse and Snowflake based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The analytics engine is not bad at forecasting predictions."
"Provides good security and reliability."
"Some of the best features are stored procedures, parallelism, and different indexing strategies."
"I think it scales really well and as long as you take enough time to learn a little bit about it, it works really well."
"The standout feature of IBM Db2 Warehouse, which is particularly valuable for large enterprises, is its ability to handle big data."
"It can be mounted on the cloud, which is a huge plus. If the client, for example, starts small with on-premise deployment and then it rapidly needs to grow, we can transfer this to the cloud easily."
"The adaptation to development languages is most valuable. Our developers can SQL code or something else. It has been convenient in that regard."
"The pricing is reasonable and matches the rest of the market."
"The most valuable feature of Snowflake is it's an all-in-one data warehousing solution."
"Its performance is a big advantage. When you run a query, its performance is very good. The inbound and outbound share features are also very useful for sharing a particular database. By using these features, you can allow others to access the Snowflake database and query it, which is another advantage of this solution. It has good security, and we can easily integrate it. We can connect it with multiple source systems."
"The most valuable features of Snowflake are its performance and power."
"I like the fact that we don't need a DBA. It automatically scales stuff."
"For us, the virtual warehousing is likely the most valuable aspect."
"I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data."
"The biggest problems we have is when the backup solution is failing or slow and we run out of log space, which has happened probably a couple of times in the last four years."
"IBM Db2 Warehouse needs to improve its interface."
"There should be more material available for training and training should be free."
"In terms of improvement, IBM Db2 Warehouse should be more scalable."
"Lacks sufficient documentation and particularly in Spanish."
"The biggest challenge anyone could have with Db2 Warehouse is their references or online resources and documentation. They are very, very, very limited on the web."
"The areas of the solution that is needing the most improvement are separating compute from storage, elasticity, which means scaling up and then retracting."
"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."
"It would be better if they had a data profile tool that tells me where the gaps are in my time series data."
"Snowflake has to improve their spatial parts since it doesn't have much in terms of geo-spatial queries."
"Its stability could be better."
"There are some challenges with loading unstructured data and integrating some message queues or brokers. In one project, we had a problem connecting to one of the message queues and we had to take a different route altogether on Microsoft Azure."
"Snowflake could improve if they had an Operational Data Store(ODS) space."
"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."
"From the documentation, the black box is not very descriptive. Snowflake does not reveal how exactly the data is processed or sourced."
IBM Db2 Warehouse is ranked 14th in Data Warehouse with 8 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 92 reviews. IBM Db2 Warehouse is rated 7.6, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Db2 Warehouse writes "Useful for ETL process and has good documentation ". 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 is most compared with Oracle Exadata, Amazon Redshift, Apache Hadoop, IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud and BigQuery, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and AWS Lake Formation. See our IBM Db2 Warehouse vs. Snowflake report.
See our list of best Data Warehouse vendors and best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors.
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