Snowflake Reviews

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.

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. 

We're ingesting third-party data analytics into a database held within Snowflake. We have pre-production and production environments with integration to staging and production schemas.

It has improved the way our organization functions. However, we're still pretty elementary in our understanding of how it all works and the complete capabilities of Snowflake.

The adaptation to development languages is most valuable. Our developers can SQL code or something else. It has been convenient in that regard.

The data sharing capabilities across business units within the organization should be better. There could also be better integration.

I have been using Snowflake for a year and three months.

We have high confidence in it.

We have high confidence in its scalability. In terms of its users, for our solution, we only have a team of 10, but we have plans to increase its usage.

We haven't had any technical contact. All of it has been internal for our organization.

This is a net-new solution. So, it's brand new. We chose Snowflake for a variety of reasons, but mainly, we chose it for its scalability and data sharing capabilities.

I would rate it a three out of five in terms of complexity just because we didn't have any Snowflake developers that were available. The implementation took about three months.

We implemented it on our own.

We have not yet seen an ROI.

We're based on credits. So, we're paying four and a half dollars of credit. There are no additional costs. I would rate it a two out of five in terms of pricing.

I would advise ensuring that you have the expertise with domain knowledge in Snowflake. The time from initial concept to deployment could be expedited extremely fast. Just from our internal learnings, we see that our time to production has increased month over month.

I would rate it a six out of ten just because we're unaware or naive to the full capabilities of the product. However, I would highly recommend it in terms of setting up data warehousing internally over an Azure solution, such as Synapse, or something else.

We have day-in and day-out data coming from our various heterogeneous source systems. We read from that and we load data into our target tables, or rather data lake and data warehouse that is built into Snowflake. We can even translate and delete items. Apart from that, we use the tasks and schedule jobs within Snowflake. Once the data is generated into the final data material, we share it with the client for their review.

Time travel is one feature that really helps us out. If there is some data discrepancy or something wrong that happens with the table, at any point, we can get that data back and time travel via fail-safe features. They're really good. 

The feasibility to increase horizontal or vertical scaling is great. It really helps a developer at an enterprise level. If you're considering scaling, it won't take much time. 

We can create cloning via Snowflake. There's a lot of time savings.

The initial setup is simple. 

The solution could use a little bit more UI. Something was in process, however, it's not yet deployed or in the version that I'm using it is not deployed. If we have to use any table or any schema in other DB features, the prompt comes over after a dot. Whenever we are using it it would really help if it looked better. 

If you're running a procedure, it just gives a standard error instead of the exact error captured. If you have to look at it, you need to go into the history to look into which query failed, and we need to figure it out. Instead, if the error, whatever it is, is instead displayed in the history, showing the point of failure, it would be more visible. It would save some time for all the people who are using it.

There are some reporting analytics that we can use. I'm aware of those. However, if there was more reporting, we'd appreciate that. We'd like for it to become a complete one-stop-shop solution. 

We'd like to have some automation around small tasks, especially around scheduling.

I've been working on the solution for two years. 

In the past three years, I have faced instability. In just one or two instances, I would say when we were running the queries, it was not fetching any result and the error was not proper. That said, that happened in just one or two instances, in the lower environments. Otherwise, the product is very stable.

The solution is quite scalable both horizontally and vertically. It's an easy job. We just need to resize it. 

Within our module, there are around eight to ten people who are working on Snowflake. In a full project, if I'm looking at the holistic picture, there are around 30 to 40 people who are using Snowflake.

We've reached out to technical support in the past. In some cases, we were not even able to fetch the data. Or, a couple of times, in the time traveler, the pay phase time was expired and we had to retrieve that data. When that happened, we had to reach out to Snowflake support. In the first instance, they said there was downtime at that server, which we were not informed about. Since it was in the lower environment, it didn't cause an issue. 

Overall, the technical support was really good. They were on it. They helped as much as they could. For a few things they needed some approvals, and they took that. They got back to us in even less time than was required by the SLA.

Positive

We are also working with Teradata.

The main difference is that Snowflake is on a cloud server and Teradata is still a legacy system. Teradata was one of our source systems. We were loading it into Snowflake. With Teradata, when you create primary care, something constrains the way you want to do it so that you do not put an additional effort into your ETL. That changes when it comes to Snowflake. If you're clustering something on a case, obviously you end up paying the extra cost. That is one basic and main difference that we saw.

That said, you can process a huge amount of data in Snowflake. This becomes a challenge in Teradata. When we were reading the data, we had to load that data into Snowflake. When we were trying to read that data, we had to obviously divide it into chunks and then load it into Snowflake. Loading into Snowflake was like a cakewalk. Everything is moving into the cloud now. Legacy systems like Teradata just can't handle the amount of data required. 

I've worked on many of the legacy systems like Oracle, DB2, et cetera. Migration from one environment to a higher environment was a huge thing. The DVS used to take two or three days sometimes depending on how many tables or what the objects are and what they had to create. Now, with the cloning feature that we have, the idle time for the developers, or even the people who are looking at the data, the analysts, and everyone, is reduced to none. We just clone it, we load the data and the data is available without any hindrances.

The solution is straightforward. 

My Azure ID was created by the DBA. As soon as I had to log in, my user role was set up. To log in to the interface hardly took me more than two or three minutes. Compared to our Data Bricks, it was pretty simple. It's hassle-free. 

The maintenance of the DBs and the production services are normally taken care of by the team itself who's handling the production support. However, just in case, if there is something, if a huge mishap happens, which we cannot recover, or we would need Snowflake customer support help, that is when the help is taken. Otherwise, the team handles everything in-house. 

The majority of the cases that we have seen are some queries stuck somewhere and out of the blue. In the case of some source data, it decides to send you a huge amount of data on a particular day. While we have seen some mishaps, a regular case requires our developers to deal with it.

We handled the initial setup in-house. 

The pricing is fair for all the features that Snowflake is providing. The way Snowflake has emerged in the past few years is impressive. It was just a beginner in the space, and it has become a leader in the market. For all the features it provides at a basic cost, it is impressive.

There are no extra costs involved unless you need to scale and grow and need more in terms of size. When we started, a medium-size was sufficient. We'd since needed more. 

The solution allows us to suspend our warehouse as well if we would like. 

That said, even if you're paying a little more cost for the data safety that you have, you will ensure that there is no data loss that will happen. It's very impressive.

My past company was a Snowflake customer. This current company is not, however, it may be on the verge of it. 

I'm using the latest version of the solution. We switched clouds at some point. I was using it on AWS, and now it is on Azure. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. I would rate it nine out of ten. 

We are silver or gold partners. The main use case is that we are building a data lake. We are creating a couple of downstream applications as well that will be used by data scientists. So, we will have a single data lake that will be used across the organization by different business domain users. The data is multi-source. We have data from SAP, JDE, and some Excel files.

The speed of data loading and being able to quickly create the environment are most valuable. 

For data, it provides built-in security and compliance with different standards, such as SOC 2, ISO, etc. So, we don't have to do a separate audit for compliance.

There are some gray areas. For example, there is no clarity on where the data sits exactly. That is their proprietary information, and they are not sharing those details. 

Its price should be improved. On the cost-side, it is more expensive than others.

If they could bring in some tools for data integration, it would be really great.

I have been using this solution for almost two and a half years.

It is pretty stable. Its stability is excellent.

It is scalable. As of now, there are 500 users, but slowly, we are planning to roll out to multiple regions. It is currently in Europe, and we will be rolling it out to the APAC and USA regions. By the year-end, there will be more than 1,000 users.

They're perfect. They're excellent. It could be because we are partners.

It is straightforward. It is not that complex.

Our own team deploys it for customers, but the initial configuration is done only by the Snowflake team because that is their area. 

I have worked with multiple clouds, and cost-wise, it is a bit costlier than others, such as Redshift. Its price should be reduced.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

The solution has use cases related to retail stores and sales.

The most valuable features of Snowflake are that you have to pay per usage, and you don't have to worry about the maintenance of the data warehouse because it is on the cloud.

The solution’s pricing could be cheaper. It would be helpful if Snowflake could create good reports instead of using Power BI reports.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

Snowflake is a scalable solution. We have four to five customers for Snowflake who use it regularly.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

The solution's deployment in a development environment takes only a couple of minutes.

Users have to pay a licensing fee for the solution, which is expensive.

Snowflake is deployed on the cloud. The solution is providing HIPAA compliance, which is sufficient. Users looking for a pay-as-you-use product available on Azure or AWS should consider Snowflake.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight 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 to build the pipelines in stream sets, including data source, data warehouse, and destination endpoints.

The solution's most valuable features are storage, run time, scalability, and minimum query time compared to other vendors.

The solution's stability needs improvement.

I have been using the solution for seven or eight months.

Recently, I encountered an issue with the solution's data warehouse. The resource monitor had exceeded its quota. I rate its stability as an eight.

I rate the solution's scalability as a nine.

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

The solution is more straightforward to use than the other IDBMS tools. It has a simple query process. Its computing time is less as well. One can easily have access to it. I rate it as a nine.