Snowflake Reviews

We use Snowflake for data warehousing.

We would like to see more security including more masking and more encryption at the database level.

We have been using Snowflake for three months.

Stability-wise, this product is good.

Snowflake is quite scalable. We have four people who are using it.

So far, technical support has been good.

The initial setup is very simple.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Snowflake is to start small, then prove out the value and you can grow.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a big data company. We have many thousands of devices deployed from our customer base. These devices upload data, on an hourly basis, to a central storage. Next, we run some ETF processes that crunch and process data, then we store that data in a structured way on Snowflake.

Over the past six months, it has been more of a development project.

I am using the latest version.

• I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data. That has been very interesting to us. 
• The robustness of the system is very useful to us. 
• The availability of the system. 

We would like Snowflake to be able to do inter-cloud migrations. That would be great. I want to be able to switch clouds.

Six months.

It is stable.

If you go with one cloud provider, you can't switch.

We have very few users. There is just a very limited number who are mostly developers. We did not roll out the end product. We did not roll out product and services based on that foundation/infrastructure yet.

I have not personally contacted technical support.

We previously used HPE and Microsoft Insight. We switched to Snowflake for the availability, security, and loading times.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was very quick. The complexity came from our specific use case scenario.

We also looked at HPE and Microsoft Insight.

Analyze your user scenario. If your scenario is managing large amounts of data in extremely, different environments in a structured way, then this is a good option.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We use the solution for data warehouses and data modeling.

I have found the solution's most valuable features to be storage, flexibility, ease of use, and security.

There is a need for improvements in the documentation, this would allow more people to switch over to this solution. I would like to see in the future a wizard for data modelization automation.

We have been using this solution for approximately one year.

The solution is stable.

I have found the solution to be scalable. We have a few employees working on this solution in my organization.

The solution is a SaaS, it can be installed and managed by your provider. The installation setup is not difficult in this case. However, the configuration took us a couple of days.

We did the configuration of the solution ourselves. You need a data engineer and modeler for the movement of information into the solution.

There is a licensing for this solution and we purchased an enterprise license. Overall the solution is cost-effective.

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.

I would recommend this solution to others and we are going to keep using the solution in the future.

I rate Snowflake an eight out of ten.

We are a consulting company so our primary use depends on the niche that we are providing the services to and on which of the different versions they have. I think we are mainly using Snowflake Enterprise.

In general, it is being used for integrating information. Snowflake is a database platform, it gives information to support analytic needs, such as advanced data analytics like machine learning. In some of those cases it is also used for descriptive analytics, for instance BI.

One of example of how Snowflake has improved a client's organization is the democratization, it makes information available to more of the users.

The features that I have found most valuable are the ease of use, the rapidness, how quickly the solution can be implemented, and of course that it's been very easy to move from the on-premise world to the Cloud world because Snowflake is based on SQL also.

I think that the area of improvement with Snowflake is to improve the administration. It would benefit from an administration that allows you to be aware of your credit consumption once you have the service so that you may be sure how many credits you are consuming when you use the platform and to make sure that you are making the most efficient use of these resources. In other words, to improve their interface so that you may monitor the consumption of your credits on Cloud.

I also heard from a company we work for that it could be more user-friendly because it provides some tools but they are not user-friendly.

Additionally, it would be very helpful if Snowflake integrated machine learning and some other advanced analytics features within their language or product capabilities. Right now, they do it through some other company where you have to buy these capabilities from other vendors. There are some customers that don't have complex needs for machine learning or advanced analytics so they don't have to buy it from another vendor but can use it from the product itself if they have it.

The whole company has been using Snowflake for about three years.

In terms of stability, so far it is very stable.

Snowflake is very scalable. Our client companies where we implement Snowflake are medium to large sized. These companies have offices in different parts of the world, not just some regions, but companies with office users in different parts of the world. We are dealing with international companies. Their tendency is to increase the use of the Snowflake platform. It would serve all the analytical needs in these companies.

I have not directly experienced the technical support. It's not part of my job to be involved on those kind of issues, but we constantly receive information as a partner from them and we are very in good touch with them and with the people we are working with, meaning the representatives that are within the Latin American market, which is where I work. They are very open and very fast with communication.

The initial setup is easy. Full deployment takes a few weeks. The initial deployment for the first initiatives might take weeks. It's not complex, really. You may have it loaded after a full day and already providing results or interacting, but there are some other companies that have to be implemented to extract and consume the information from the database. But it's very easy.

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.

I would definitely recommend Snowflake.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Snowflake an eight.

I give it an eight out of 10 due to its room for improvement in the user interface for the monitoring of the credit consumption and that the user experience is not friendly. And also because the machine learning is lacking some advanced analytic features.

We use it for presentations to clients. 

The syntax is advanced which reduces the time to write code. 

They should improve the reporting tools. 

They could increase their bandwidth to connect to other ETL tools. 

I have been using Snowflake for around six months. 

The stability is good. There is no performance downtime. 

If there is a need for scaling the setup is not so good. 

Their support is good. 

The initial setup was not complex. We needed a dedicated person for the setup. Once we know the requirements, it's not that complex. It has straightforward parameters. 

I would rate Snowflake an eight out of ten. 

The primary use case is big data warehouses.

• Excellent performance
• Very easy to use
• Amazing UI

The most valuable feature is the snapshot database. In one second, you can just take a snapshot of the database for test purposes.

One year.

Basically, it is not cheap.

The solution is mainly used for analytics in data warehouses. We are independent consultants and customers of Snowflake. 

The scalability of this product is great and the fact that it has a so-called zero clone copy and is near zero maintenance is also great. There are a lot of good features, it's a very sophisticated, cutting edge technology and is super easy to use. They are developing the platform very, very quickly so there are plenty of new features implemented all the time. You can concentrate on implementing things in Snowflake without tuning or configuring it.

There are some functions in the SQL language in other products which are not yet included in Snowflake's SQL. It would be helpful to have those included, they're nice features. It's a minor issue because all those things can be implemented in some other way. Not essential, but it would be nice to have them. 

I've been using this solution for 18 months. 

This is a stable solution and the maintenance and updates are automatic. Snowflake is responsible for that.

I have been quite satisfied with the technical support.

The initial setup is very simple, just go to the internet and start using it. Of course, if it has to implement to part of the customer's own cloud infrastructure, then there are more steps to configure. We provide that service for our customers. 

Everything is included in the license fee which is mid-range in terms of pricing.

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 think the solution is suited to big companies because they tend to have lots of data. The more data you have, the more you need power and scalability to process it. I would recommend finding a good partner already familiar with the solution for implementation. It's good to have someone familiar with the architecture.

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

We were using MySQL and MongoDB for our regular operations but when we grew, we were forced to handle a huge number of datasets. We could have petabytes of data in and out on a regular basis. We struggled a lot to complete the operations in a timely manner. With Amazon Redshift, we gained a lot in terms of timing, as well as project completion. Even-through we are happy with Redshift, in terms of pricing and availability of nodes, I am more comfortable with Snowflake. Some of the scoring mechanism really works well in the distributed architecture of Snowflake.

• Scalability. This solution has the ability to load a huge number of datasets (I have experience with petabytes of data) and process them. Storage is not limited, and we can increase what we want.
  
• Performance. The distributed architecture of Snowflake has the capacity to process huge datasets faster and allows us to scale up and down according to our needs.
• Flexibility. This feature is helpful for the user to increase the node size and config depending on their need. There is no need to wait for hardware to be in place whenever we increase the dataset. Snowflake provides the option to increase the node or cluster size whenever required.
• Multi-formatted accessibility. The Snowflake engine has the capability to read the following file formats: CSV, DELIMITER, FIXEDWIDTH, AVRO, JSON, BZIP2, GZIP, LZOP. The user can choose which format is best for their requirements.
• Configuration. Even though its running in the AWS platform, it beats their platform product. I feel more flexible with this solution than I do with Redshift.
• Snowpipe. Snowpipe is a better system to feed stream data to the Snowflake database.
  

Snowflake has to improve their spatial components since it doesn't have much in terms of geo-spatial queries.

No

No

It's really good. I am happy with the product and the service.

With Amazon Redshift, we gained a lot in terms of timing as well as project completion. Even through we are happy with Redshift, in terms of pricing and availability of nodes, I am more comfortable with Snowflake.

The initial setup of Snowflake is very simple and straightforward. We do not need to read or understand any of the technical documentation. It is a plug-and-play service or platform.

I have implemented this solution through an in-house team.

I can't directly convey ROI because we are not using only Snowflake. We are using multiple products to increase our revenue and decrease time consumption. This makes it difficult to calculate ROI.

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.