Snowflake is built on top of the Teradata architecture but it has more flexibility.

Many other products equivalent to Teradata are available in the market, like BigQuery, Redshift, and Snowflake.

I've also evaluated Snowflake, which allows you to expose your data to multiple sources for monitoring without additional work.

We did a six-month review of potential candidates and options. Every three to five years, we re-evaluate the selection criteria and re-open the solution's design with an invitation to the vendors to offer an alternative. The process consumes about three months, but it has allowed us to keep current and, more importantly, to leverage off the process so as to ensure that we are getting the best value for our money.

Every few years we examine the option of migrating to other platforms such as HPE Vertica, Oracle Exadata, or SQream.

In the past, it turned out that other solutions, in order to provide the full range of abilities that the Teradata platform provides plus the migration costs, would end up costing more than Teradata does.

One of my clients recently tried to switch solutions but they have rolled back to Teradata. The same thing happened with another company that I know of in Pakistan, where they tried working with an IBM product.

We also looked at DB2.

We did performance testing. We had a set of real life MicroStrategy reports. Our conditions were: Not allowed to redesign data model, not allowed to rewrite the queries, all queries should be generated by MicroStrategy, no aggregates. Teradata appeared to be way faster than a similarly configured (in terms of hardware) Oracle server.

We also looked at Oracle Exadata.

It is faster than Oracle, and that is what we need.

I was not in a position as a consultant to make software solution decisions.

We did not evaluate other vendors before choosing Teradata.

IBM, Oracle.

Usual alternatives in the same segment for our clients are Oracle Exadata, SAP HANA, and Hadoop.

I mainly evaluated Oracle.

We also looked at Hadoop.

It's already proven so we did not evaluate other industry solutions.