We performed a comparison between Snowflake and Teradata based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both solutions received high marks from users. Snowflake comes out on top in this comparison. It is a powerful and reliable product that is easy to deploy. In addition, its users feel that it is reasonably priced.
"The way it is built and designed is valuable. The way the shared model is built and the way it exploits the power of the cloud is very good. Certain features related to administration and management, akin to Oracle Flashback and all that, are very important for modern-day administration and management. It is also good in terms of managing and improving performance, indexing, and partitioning. It is sort of completely automated. Everything is essentially under the hood, and the engine takes care of it all. As a data warehouse on the cloud, Snowflake stands strong on its ground even though each of the cloud providers has its own data warehouse, such as Redshift for AWS or Synapse for Azure."
"The overall ecosystem was easy to manage. Given that we weren't a very highly technical group, it was preferable to other things we looked at because it could do all of the cloud tunings. It can tune your data warehouse to an appropriate size for controlled billing, resume and sleep functions, and all such things. It was much more simple than doing native Azure or AWS development. It was stable, and their support was also perfect. It was also very easy to deploy. It was one of those rare times where they did exactly what they said they could do."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Scaling is a big plus point of Snowflake."
"My company wanted to have all our data in one single place and this what we use Snowflake for. Snowflake also allows us to build connectors to different data sources."
"The querying speed is fast."
"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."
"Once you have finished your designs they can be easily imported to Snowflake and the information can be readily accessed without an IT expert."
"It is a stable program."
"It has reduced a lot of reworking on maintaining indexes, partitions, etc."
"Improved performance of ETL procedures, reporting."
"It's very, very fast"
"It is a solid database a lot of different tools to move data."
"When it comes to integration, tools like Informatica seamlessly connect with Teradata. We ensure the Teradata database is configured correctly in Informatica, including the proper hostname and properties for the load process. We didn't find any major complexity or issues with integration."
"The most valuable feature of Teradata is the quick processing of large data."
"I've never had any issues with scalability."
"It's difficult to know how to size everything correctly."
"The price could be improved."
"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway."
"Their UiPath, the workspace area, needs some work."
"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."
"If we can have a feature where the results can be moved to different tabs, so that I can compare the results with earlier queries before applying the changes, it would be great."
"I don't know about GCP, if they have connected for GCP. If they don't, they should allow for it."
"We are yet to figure out how to integrate tools, such as Liquibase, to release changes to our data warehouse model."
"The solution needs improvement in its stability, support and pricing."
"There is some improvement required on OLTP level and some analytical function is missing."
"Teradata could improve by being less complicated. There are some aspects that are not available on the Unix server and a Unix system is required to access some data, such as in case of an emergency."
"Teradata is an expensive tool. Like, if you're already using Microsoft products like Windows, they'll market all their products together. And with the rise of cloud technologies, companies will adopt solutions that offer them some privileges or facilities. Similar to how SAP does it in the market, so do Microsoft and other companies. Even Oracle and other such tools are quite commonly seen compared to Teradata's competitors in everyday solutions."
"Data synchronization to the DR site."
"Sometimes the large injestion takes days to load data, and some of our stored procedures take two to three days."
"Teradata hardly supports unstructured data or semi-structured data"
"It needs a teaching web site with more training on third-party tools used for BI."
Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 92 reviews while Teradata is ranked 3rd in Data Warehouse with 54 reviews. Snowflake is rated 8.4, while Teradata is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Teradata writes "Offers seamless integration capabilities and performance optimization features, including extensive indexing and advanced tuning capabilities". Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Vertica, AWS Lake Formation and Amazon EMR, whereas Teradata is most compared with SQL Server, Oracle Exadata, MySQL, BigQuery and Amazon Redshift. See our Snowflake vs. Teradata report.
See our list of best Data Warehouse vendors and best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors.
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