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Oracle Big Data Appliance vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Oracle Big Data Appliance
Ranking in Data Warehouse
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
106
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (3rd), AI Software Development (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Oracle Big Data Appliance is 2.6%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 9.4%, down from 13.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Snowflake9.4%
Oracle Big Data Appliance2.6%
Other88.0%
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1031826 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analytics Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Platinum partnership leverages advanced storage and fosters seamless data integration
Areas of Oracle Big Data Appliance that can be improved include the pricing perspective because nowadays they have competition. We have so many technologies that have come to the market for less than even one-fourth or one-fifth of the Oracle price. For my side, the last time I worked with Oracle was in '21, '22. The price is a challenge that they have to look after. From the storage and data management perspective, I cannot recall anything that they have to improve, but they have to improve the visualization part significantly because they offer Oracle BI, which is an extremely not-matured application.
SunilPatil1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Asset Builder at Genpact - Headstrong
Have prioritized security while managing multi-agent data migration and cloud adoption
We utilize Time Travel with Snowflake because this is a very useful feature. Everyone finds it crucial because in conventional data platforms, it's very difficult to handle these kinds of things. This feature is essential, though I don't have the use cases currently; it is just there for implementation. Regarding Snowflake's automated scaling and suspension features, this auto-scaling is very significant. We had a comparison with Databricks and Snowflake a few months back, and this auto-scaling takes an edge within Snowflake; that's what our observation reflects.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The best feature of Oracle Big Data Appliance, from a price perspective for the storage, is because they have technology called the ZFS technology; it offers huge storage with a decent price."
"The most valuable feature is that it can be used in conjunction with Spark memory processing, and our processing time has gone to 20 minutes from what used to be two or three hours on the mainframe."
"Because Big Data Appliance allows me to have a single source of truth, it means I have clean data that can be monetized and leveraged to gain more insights with real-time reports from the dashboard."
"The best thing about the product is that the end-user can build the reports by themselves without really knowing anything about databases."
"We could work on large unstructured datasets from different parts of the world on Facebook and Twitter to get better insights."
"Big Data responds to my needs."
"This is a comprehensive solution that is easy to deploy."
"The most valuable feature of Snowflake is the query performance."
"Snowflake's most valuable features are data enrichment and flattening."
"The thing I find most valuable is that scalability, space storage, and computing power is separate. When you scale up, it is live from one second to the next — constantly available as you scale — so there is no downtime or interruption of services."
"It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."
"The ability to share the data and the ability to scale up and down easily are the most valuable features. The concept of data sharing and data plumbing made it very easy to provide and share data. The ability to refresh your Dev or QA just by doing a clone is also valuable. It has the dynamic scale up and scale down feature. Development and deployment are much easier as compared to other platforms where you have to go through a lot of stuff. With a tool like DBT, you can do modeling and transformation within a single tool and deploy to Snowflake. It provides continuous deployment and continuous integration abilities. There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only get charged for your usage. You only pay for what you use. When we share the data downstream with business partners, we can specifically create compute for them, and we can charge back the business."
"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."
"Can be leveraged with respect to better performance, auto tuning and competition."
"We've been mostly very happy with its capabilities."
 

Cons

"We had to pursue several performance tuning measures to bring up the system to scale."
"From a technical perspective, Big Data Appliance could be improved with more innovation in the AI and machine-learning parts instead of relying on Cloudera."
"We need to display the results on our website. I think there is another product that joins with it to give you the possibility."
"The product should be simplified for the average user."
"Areas of Oracle Big Data Appliance that can be improved include the pricing perspective because nowadays they have competition; we have so many technologies that have come to the market for less than even one-fourth or one-fifth of the Oracle price."
"It seems like the deployment of repositories has become more difficult in later versions of the product rather than easier."
"Pricing is quite high for Snowflake Data Cloud, which is an area that could be improved."
"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway."
"It needs a bit more rigor and governance, which is something you don't get with newer tools. This makes it less enterprise scalable. Its governance and structure can be enhanced, which would really be valuable. I would like to see some kind of prebuilt functionality in terms of having almost like a pre-built data warehouse. A functionality for generating automated kind of pieces would be good."
"The aspect of it that was more complicated was stored procedures. It does not support SQL language-based stored procedures. You have to write in JavaScript. If they supported SQL language and stored procedures, it would make migration from on-prem much simpler. In most cases, if an on-prem solution has stored procedures, they're usually written in SQL. They're not written as what most on-prem DBMS would refer to as an external stored procedure, which is what these feel like to most people because they're written in a language outside of SQL."
"There could be better ELT tools that are appropriate for Snowflake. We decided on Matillion and it seemed to be the only one. There need to be better choices, it would be great if Snowflake provided an ELT solution that people could use. Additionally, if there was a pure cloud-based ELT tool it would be useful."
"We would like to see more security including more masking and more encryption at the database level."
"Sometimes, I face some issues like not having permissions. These aren't as crucial, but there are common errors sometimes where the database is down, or a table is nullified and a new table is added and you are not given access to that."
"They need to improve its ETL functionality so that Snowflake becomes an ETL product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Oracle's prices are too high compared to others in the market."
"Snowflake licensing is more flexible and it is cheaper than other solutions. I can use it for only 10 days for MVP, or three years, and for flexible models. I can scale up, or down, and the pricing is based on the volume and duration. There are many licensing permutation combinations available."
"It is hard to say because we're usually engaged in the transition as opposed to the long term. Their storage costs are easily within pennies of what AWS S3 would normally cost. Most of the clients I've been working with are in the financial sector, and they're relatively small. I would put them in an SMB connection. The first thing we have to bring up for people is that they're going to build this. They shouldn't store their data in S3. They should pipeline directly into Snowflake and use it on their storage. So, the cost is a big issue because these are small to medium size companies, and that is the biggest thing we had to price point for them."
"It's expensive."
"It is on a monthly basis. It is based on your usage. There are no additional costs from the point of the licensing fee. We do give some kind of evaluation to the customers about how much it is going to be. You can decide in Snowflake the virtual machine that you are using for customers. There are several kinds of virtual machines that you can use. It is similar to the clothing sizes: small to extra large. If you need more power in the coming month, you can decide in advance and take a more powerful machine. You can just select it from the platform. You can also decide which machine you want to take for extracting data."
"The price for the solution's license depends on the use cases."
"Users have to pay a licensing fee for the solution, which is expensive."
"There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only pay for what you use."
"I have worked with multiple clouds, and cost-wise, it is a bit costlier than others, such as Redshift. Its price should be reduced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise61
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Oracle Big Data Appliance?
Areas of Oracle Big Data Appliance that can be improved include the pricing perspective because nowadays they have competition. We have so many technologies that have come to the market for less th...
What is your primary use case for Oracle Big Data Appliance?
The typical use case for Oracle Big Data Appliance, which my clients use, is usually that the customer who has an Oracle application uses it because they can leverage the storage part. I don't need...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
I am not the person who manages pricing, setup cost, and licensing. Our team is not limited in pricing. The only experience we have had in terms of running and reprocessing a large number of histor...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
One main area for improvement in Snowflake is cost visibility and optimization; while it's flexible and scalable, costs can increase quickly if warehouses are left running unnecessarily or workload...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake?
As a Data Engineer, I primarily use Snowflake for data warehousing tasks as well as ETL processing, and sometimes I also use it for data sharing. I personally find Snowflake better than other tools...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Caixa Bank
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle Big Data Appliance vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.