Snowflake Reviews

The solution is primarily used for data warehousing. 

It's a good tool. It is quite easy to manage. 

There are a lot of features. 

If you accidentally delete something, you can time travel and retrieve it. 

Within half an hour or even 15 minutes, you can set up a new data warehouse, and you can clone a table or whatever you like. 

It's easy to provide access to clients if they need to.

The solution is stable. 

It can scale well.

There is good online documentation via the community, and you can learn the solution on your own. 

These days, they are pushing users towards the GUI or graphical version. However, I am more familiar with the classic version. I'd like to continue to work with it using the older approach. That's just a personal choice. I prefer the database views like you would get on an SQL Server or other databases. 

I've been using the solution for two and a half years or so. I haven't used it for too long. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. I've never had an issue when you connect it to your infrastructure. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. 

We have 250 or more users on the solution currently. They are predominantly IT specialists, including engineers and developers. It's for those on the application side of development. The solution is scalable. I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten.

I've never directly dealt with technical support. We do have a direct contact. There are other people who might have. There might have been a version issue at some point. However, it wasn't something I dealt with. I've only interacted with the Snowflake community pages. 

We are currently moving everything from Oracle to Snowflake. 

We've used a combination of other tools in the past. We've used Microsoft's Stack, for example. We were using a SQL database in the past. 

We're migrating from Oracle right now. We have two people that handle the maintenance of the solution. A company may need two to four engineers to manage maintenance 24/7.

It's not difficult to deploy. It's pretty straightforward. It took us only a couple of minutes in order to get everything up and running. 

We pay a licensing fee to use the solution. It's paid monthly. My understanding is that it is not that expensive. We might have a specific extra cost surrounding running it on a private cloud. I'd rate the cost as six out of ten. It's moderately priced compared to others on the market. That said, I don't directly manage the account and don't directly deal with pricing. We have a contract of three to five years. 

I'm an end-user. 

Everything is on the cloud, and therefore I'm always using the latest version of the solution. It updates itself regularly. 

It fulfills our needs, and it's easy to pick up by looking at some reference guides. I'm still getting used to the GUI. I might find it even easier to use if I go through more formal training. Right now, I've simply learned it on my own. Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case for Snowflake is inputting data generated by AWS.

This solution has helped our organization by being easy to maintain and having good technical support.

The features I have found most valuable are the options to connect with extendable sources in three buckets in which we can also create stages.

I think that Snowflake could improve its user interface. The current one is not interactive.

I have been using this solution for about one year.

I would rate the stability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a 10, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. There are around five developers in our company and 500 end users for this solution.

We previously worked in AWS.

I would rate the initial setup process an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would advise other people trying to use this solution to build a skill balance as it's quite difficult to work in Snowflake.

I would rate this solution as a whole a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

The use cases are data warehousing, data pipelining, data engineering, reporting, and dashboarding. Instead of using Oracle or other systems, you can simply put Snowflake there. It works like a normal database. This way, you avoid consuming the system with extra data. So the experience so far is good.

One of Snowflake’s most valuable features is that you don't need to worry about computing. You don't need to scale up the compute size. When you are using a compute pay-per-use model and the storage is cheap, the data can go from terabytes to petabytes. In this case, you don't need to procure any new hardware or software, it automatically scales up.

I think the problem is maybe the design of the product. It is supposed to be a warehouse product, you can't expect it to be a transaction system. It is not designed for transaction systems. It's purposely built for data warehouses. So people cannot expect to use Snowflake for transaction systems. They misunderstand the product.

So I would not call it a product negative. I would say it's more of a user error, for example, people using a hammer for something else. But that's a problem. It works perfectly fine, otherwise.

They need to work on the design. That would suffice.

I have been using Snowflake day in and day out for four and a half years now.

It’s a stable product. I don't think there is any problem. I think the product is engineered well.

It is good at scaling. You can scale it horizontally or scale vertically. That's a big plus. Scaling easily is a big thing.

They are really good and responsive. I normally raise the ticket and they immediately come back with an email. They keep posting updates and follow-up promptly.

There is no setup issue at all. It's very smooth. You need to do a simple login. If you're doing the initial setup, it's maybe a couple of days of work. That's it. If you are migrating or want to do a proper new database setup, it's just a day's work.

We use Snowflake pretty heavily. We pay a significant amount of money for the tool. I'd say we pay $300k to $400K every year.

It's a great product. I think people don't need to stick to traditional Oracle systems and rather go for Snowflake. There you don't need to worry about any updates. It is a cloud product, so it automatically updates regularly. The advice is to get used to this way of working as it's new. You have to get familiar with the technology, and a little bit of the terminology. It's a very good product. I would rate it eight out of ten.

We are currently using this product for data lake and data warehouse projects. Snowflake creates our repositories and enables the view from other tools like Docker and Power BI to create that data mesh. We use the data to create a process inside the warehouse. We are customers of Snowflake and I'm the senior manager of information technology infrastructure.

Snowflake is user-friendly and reliable in creating the data warehouse and carrying out data modeling. 

I'd like to see the data science functionality improved to a degree that would enable data scientists to work together with the data engineering team. The solution is focused on SQL and some kind of language or free support would be useful and would add some functionality to the machine-learning process. 

The current API is very limited and difficult to configure. It's not easy to create an API and start changing data so some kind of API to expose the data would be good. We use Docker to check the data but if we could get an API that allows other tools to access the data that would be great. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The scalability is good. There are around 35 people in the company using Snowflake and six engineers dealing with maintenance. 

The technical support is good. 

Positive

The initial setup was simple and took about a month. The main point is to align the data governance and integration process because you only need to click a button to start. We had a service engineer from Snowflake help with that.

If you use the tool well, you'll see ROI from your investment.

It's important to understand the licensing model because if you're paying for the software, you're not necessarily aware of the use. It's important to monitor how you're using the resources otherwise you can find yourself in a difficult situation. Licensing costs depend on the agreement you have with Snowflake.

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

I use the tool with visualization tools like Tableau and Power BI. We load the data into these tools and use them to build customer reports. We often need to write scripts to perform transformations before sending the data to the visualization tools.

The tool's performance is good. I think it's the best in the game right now. It usually charges per query. For example, if you run a SQL query on Snowflake with the same number of data records, it would take less than half the time compared to running it on Microsoft. It has good documentation. You can pick up Snowflake if you have previous knowledge of SQL.

I can only access Snowflake from the web. It would be better if we could have an app that we can install locally on our laptops to connect to the server without needing to go to the web page. Apart from that, it's hard to point out any limitations in the tool.

I have been working with the product for four years. 

The tool is scalable. I've used it for datasets with more than ten million records.

I only put data in and modify data. Most of the time, I don't require technical support. We occasionally had downtimes, and the data engineer would escalate these issues to Snowflake to resolve them.

The solution's deployment is simple. You purchase the license on the Internet—I think there's only a free trial for thirty days—and set it up like a Gmail account. It takes less than a minute to set up. You can set up your Snowflake server or use an enterprise vendor like AWS or Azure. Recently, Snowflake has been moving away from third-party vendors. They want to set up their remote infrastructure.

The tool's pricing is based on the number of queries you want on your database. The cost is small. To get the tool's pricing, you can do the math based on the cost per query, which is $0.002. If you're running your queries frequently, your charges will be higher than running fewer queries.

I would give Snowflake a ten out of ten in terms of performance and a nine out of ten in terms of scalability. I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten. 

Snowflake is good for analytical purposes when you have a lot of historical or sales data that you need to release and use for different types of analysis, such as tracking sales and measuring the performance of your sales team and product.

The product's most important feature is unloading data to S3. It provides a single syntax query to analyze data directly from a database to an S3 bucket.

The product's performance could be improved.

I have been using Snowflake for a couple of months. We are using the latest version.

The product is stable.

We did not need to scale our Snowflake environment beyond what we needed. We have a fixed amount of traffic from a fixed number of clients. We know the load we need to handle, and based on that, our subscription is made.

Snowflake is cost-effective. The pricing is better than Firebolt. Firebolt is better when there is idle time. If we run Snowflake all the time, the cost will be higher.

We are working on two solutions for Snowflake, one for the cloud and one for on-premises. It has good documentation. If someone goes through it, they will quickly understand how it works. However, Firebolt's documentation is more comprehensive. If I need faster results, I'll prefer the Firebolt; if I need performance, I'll use Snowflake.

Overall, I rate it a nine out of ten.

We use the solution as a data warehouse for our financial services firm. 

The core feature of the platform is everything works, and that's what I like about it. Our time to market is faster, it requires less maintenance, and I can build and deploy a product exceptionally quickly.

Everything is automatic, and I don't have to do any maintenance.

I want tokenization, so they could either acquire a company that does tokenization or somehow integrate with one. If I could do tokenization in line with other development without having a third-party system, that would ease integration and security, of course.

More data governance and access control features would be a welcome addition.

We have been using Snowflake for about three and a half years. 

Snowflake is a stable platform. 

The power of Snowflake is that it scales automatically and indefinitely. We have around 500 internal users using the solution daily, and most of our applications use the product in some shape or form, so that's a few hundred thousand external users.

The support model is that we have a Snowflake rep, and if I need anything, I can reach out to him, and he can get people on board within minutes. The support is fantastic.

Positive

We weren't satisfied with our data warehouse, AWS Redshift, Oracle, and some on-prem elements such as a SQL Server. We wanted a cloud data warehouse that didn't require a lot of manual intervention and maintenance, DBAs and so on. We wanted a solution that could scale automatically and pay-as-you-go to cut down on wasteful infrastructure. Therefore, Snowflake made a lot of sense, plus compared to Redshift at the time, the separation of storage and computing was huge. That was an essential differentiator for us.

We previously used ThoughtSpot, specifically their Falcon engine, their appliance version, and it did everything on its own. We brought in Snowflake later when ThoughtSpot introduced their product called Embrace. We were among the earliest adopters to switch, and six to eight months after, we integrated with Snowflake.

The initial setup was straightforward; it was one of the easiest I've done, so I rate the solution five out of five for ease of setup.

We carried out the deployment in-house, and Snowflake is a SaaS solution, so setup was rapid. All we needed was some user account information. 

Snowflake is expensive, but when I consider what we get for that price, it's fair. I rate the solution three out of five for affordability, right in the middle. 

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

Snowflake is ahead of the competitors because it's completely automatic and hands-off in terms of maintenance. Many of the competitor products have similar features to Snowflake, but what they call automatic still requires someone to understand it. If they give us 100 levers, somebody has to know what each of them does and when to pull them, whereas Snowflake is entirely hands-off.

My advice to potential customers is to have a team member who understands performance tuning and to figure out optimal credit usage ahead of time to avoid wasteful spending.

The implementation is essential because the solution provides a lot of power out of the box, and the initial configuration needs to be fit for purpose. If I have a relatively small use case where I don't need much power or don't have much data, the product needs to be configured for that. As opposed to an external case where I might need high power for a government job, for example, then the configuration needs to be scaled up.

Snowflake is our centralized data warehouse. We bring all of our business critical information to Snowflake. It also powers all of our dashboard's reporting and analytical models.

Snowflake has improved our organization by powering company-wide dashboards that functions use to understand and manage their business. We also have dashboards that go up to our board of directors and our C-suite. Snowflake allows us to have up-to-date, consistent, and useful reporting for the entire company.

I found Snowflake's performance to be its most valuable feature. The product is an incredibly fast and performant data warehouse. We handle a lot of semi-structured data natively with it, which is nice. 

I also appreciate Snowflake's scalability. As the company has grown, as the number of Snowflake users have grown, I have not had any issue scaling.

There is room for improvement in Snowflake's integration with Python. We do a lot of SQL programming in Snowflake, but we go to a different tool to program when we have to in Python. However, I know this is an area that Snowflake's working on.

I have been using Snowflake for a year and a half at my current company. I have an additional six years of previous experience. 

Snowflake is incredibly stable. I have never had an issue with Snowflake outages.

Snowflake is scalable both in terms of the amount of data that you can run through it and the number of users that engage with it. We have five direct users and then, because Snowflake powers all the dashboards, 250 indirect users.

We plan to increase our Snowflake usage in the future. As we send more data through it and build out more sophisticated dashboards and reporting and especially statistical modeling, we will increase our usage.

I have not had a lot of issues with Snowflake, so I haven't had to utilize technical support that much. But when I have had issues, I received a response in a couple days, not the same day. The responses sometimes help solve the issue and sometimes not. The technical support could be better. 

Neutral

I did not previously use a different solution at my current company. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

Our employment was done in-house. In fact, I did it myself. 

We have seen a return on investment with Snowflake. 

We spend between $30,000 and $50,000 a year for Snowflake licensing.

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.

I think Snowflake is fantastic for both storing data and querying your data, but you should always maintain visibility into your costs. They can run up and get out of control if you're not aware of who's using Snowflake and why.