When comparing it with SAP HANA, there is no one solution that fits all. Snowflake is useful if you have a SaaS-based product such as Salesforce, Workday, Anaplan, and Greenhouse. You can get the data from this type of SaaS-based system and ingest data.

SAP is born out of the entire ERP ecosystem. You have enterprise resource planning, and you have manufacturing, finance, and other systems. Big manufacturing industries usually implement ERPs because they want to do reporting, etc. SAP has this custom box stuff, and it is very difficult to get the data out of your SAP systems. So, you have to use SAP HANA. If you're not using the SAP systems, you don't really need SAP HANA. You are free to go for Snowflake. If you have an ERP system and you need to get the data out and move into an SAP or ERP system, and you want to have a data warehouse actually of ERP system, then SAP HANA makes more sense because it can natively talk to SAP. In such a case, you don't want to go for Snowflake. 

I did not evaluate other options. I have been using Snowflake for so long and it has been so good for me to use that didn't need to.

We did. I evaluated Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift.

In terms of distinguishing features between each of them, it was really just two things. One was the speed factor of query times. The other thing that really sold us on Snowflake was their ability for data sharing. They have a unique product as part of their solution that you can share information directly with other individuals, either in their own additional private cloud or if they're not Snowflake customers, simply sharing a URL link to where they can receive data themselves.

We considered MySQL and Google Big Query.

Yes. I looked at Redshift and Vertica.

We use Hive and Hadoop as well. Snowflake is more stable and scalable.

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

I have tested all the different alternatives to Snowflake as well. It is hard to determine which one is the most suitable, as each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Before choosing to work with Snowflake we looked at virtual solutions and we looked at Redshift, we looked at Qubole and a couple of other cloud options. Earlier when we did a mining site, I was working with Alteryx, so I was already familiar with that product and its capabilities to use for comparison. We decided to go with Snowflake because it seemed mature and had what we wanted.

Before choosing this solution, we looked at SQL Server and Teradata.

We looked at IBM because it also has on-premise solutions. We also looked at Azure as well as AWS.

If necessary, we may have to get into Synapse, and do a kind of a pilot project with that as well. We may evaluate them both to see which is better. We are not there yet. We are just working on Snowflake.

I have evaluated Eclipse and IBM Netezza.

We were looking at Amazon Redshift previously. However, we decided that Snowflake was more reliable and scalable.

We moved from Red Shift to Snowflake because of scalability and the independence it provided. 

We also looked at HPE and Microsoft Insight.

We did evaluate some other solutions previously, such as Snap Analytics. All the different solution have their pros and cons. However, many are moving to this solution because it is in the cloud.

There have been a couple of other solutions that we've been participating in the evaluation process of and some others that have been included in the decision process, including Redshift from AWS and also Azure Synapse from Microsoft.

For instance, AWS Redshift looked like it was easier to implement and to be adopted by the technical users, the programmers and database programmers. So far it has been far easier to adapt this technology. I'm not saying that AWS is a better technology. It's very complex, but at least what I've seen is that for them, it looks like it's been easier to use the first time.

We liked that Snowflake is able to be used as a multi-Cloud service - it can be used in AWS Cloud, Azure Cloud, or Google Cloud. Whereas AWS, or even Synapse, can only be used in their corresponding networks.

The advantage of Snowflake is that you can focus on implementing things in Snowflake without tuning or configuring it. That's the advantage of this solution compared to others. Many other data warehouse solutions need some kind of maintenance or database administration, and that takes time. The extra time means you're being taken away from other things and in that regard, Snowflake is an absolutely great product.

I have experience working in Hadoop & Redshift as well. When I compare the three (Snowflake, Hadoop, and Redshift), Snowflake is more user-friendly in terms of configuration and maintenance.