Firebolt

What do you like best about the product?

The Fantastic Customer Support, Helping us through out engineering changes and architecture. Observing improvements in the performance every new release. Getting started with Firebolt is very quick. Implementation of Firebolt was simple and quick.We were able to integrate Firebolt for our daily usage. it is used every day for our Analytics.

What do you dislike about the product?

Still undergoing maturity as new features are added everyday

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Processing the data every day and reducing Time to Market in ingesting large chunks of data from multiple suppliers in different formats.

What do you like best about the product?

We use Firebolt to power our Business Intelligence and Analytics module in our enterprise SaaS app. With our main transactional database being Postgres, and Firebolt being Postgres-API compatible, it was very easy to write the ELT process for the transactional data in our main database to the data warehouse in Firebolt.

Our developers are also able to write Firebolt queries with ease, and the aggregate indexes have been extremely helpful at ensuring very fast performance given our reports group on many columns at once.

Firebolt is also able to handle a very consistent "trickle ingestion" workflow which is unusual for this kind of use case but the main challenge that we faced when benchmarking other solutions. This way, we're able to ensure data in the data warehouse is never stale and all reports are pulling from the latest.

What do you dislike about the product?

The only thing our team has asked for is for Firebolt to expose live charts on the dashboard to monitor engines CPU, Memory, Query count and other basic statistics, however there are queries that can be run to see this information and this has been an acceptable workaround for now.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Firebolt tackles our biggest data challenges by handling the millions of rows we need for instant reporting across our enterprise SaaS platform. We're ingesting millions of new rows daily, and frequently running massive updates to our datasets.

Before deciding on Firebolt, we benchmarked it against all other major competitors and in most cases it was at least an order of magnitude faster for our queries. What's been game-changing is how Firebolt powers all the reports in our platform without breaking a sweat. This means our customers get the insights they need immediately, without the frustrating wait times they experienced with previous solutions.

What do you like best about the product?

**UPDATED: I wanted to update this review to reflect current thoughts especially after migration to the newer platform. Speeds have been markedly improved over the already fast engines that we had been used to. Engines are now multi-purpose. The .Net SDK has been improved dramatically. Support through our platform migration was top notch. Basically all of the great things about Firebolt have been doubled down and made greater.

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Original review:
There are so many things but for starters, it's just how fast we are able to serve up query results to applications and end users regardless of the data set size. Hugely complicated queries run like lightning fast, so much so that we've pivoted from using Firebolt just for reporting and analytics to also including it in our internal tooling for our business. Things we simply couldn't pull off otherwise without a massive scaling of our infrastructure.

The cost is simply unmatched for the levels of feature and performance. We're a small company with big ambitions but cost is still a paramount consideration. We have flexibility in controlling our costs and scaling as we see fit, which is great.

I've found that my team has generally found the syntax to be pretty easy to pick up, it shares a lot of commonality with other SQL flavors we're familiar with. And even when it stumps us, the documentation is pretty robust (unlike many software vendors we use) and their support staff has been top-notch. They even share a channel in our Slack where we get quick answers to many of our questions. Firebolt goes so far as to proactively watch our query performance patterns and shares that with me and will help us fix them.

Simply put, I work WITH Firebolt to solve our problems and limitations instead of working AROUND them like we have to with some other vendors.

What do you dislike about the product?

UPDATED: Specifically, my top dislike listed here has been rectified in the new platform. Engines handle both reads and ingestion/data modification. This has allowed simplification of our code base that interacts with Firebolt as well as reduction of service interruptions.

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Original review:
The segregation of ingestion (or "general purpose") engines from read-only "analytics" engines is great from a granular control mechanism, especially as it pertains to cost. However that often requires bouncing of the read-only engine that services our applications to reflect changes made by the ingestion engine, causing a several minute outage. There are ways around it but this is often the case for us at this time.

Additionally, it would be great if there was a way to have stored queries accessible via the API access. Currently the query has to be passed to the API meaning that even where the same query could be used in our code, that is being duplicated and would necessitate an application deployment to make alterations. Compare that to a stored function/procedure model in our sql transaction engine and this is not ideal for a small shop that moves this quickly.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Firebolt serves us as our data warehouse, our primary ETL processing engine, reporting and analytics platform as well as our high performance query engine for internal tools built for the rest of our organization.

Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results. We have a specific catalog for any query, and Firebolt can generate the results much faster than other providers.

Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls. Currently, the data size of Firebolt is small. It can be increased.

I have used Firebolt for two months.

The product is stable. Firebolt takes some time to start after a certain amount of idle time, but I have yet to face any bugs. In case of a bug, the only issue is that the engine starting time is a bit high.

The solution is scalable. Our users are companies. We can disclose that our customers are either paid clients or subscription-based. They buy our solutions in-house, and different personas use them. We don't know the number of users per account because our solution is not a website.

We have used Snowflake before. We support both. Firebolt has better performance, executing queries much quicker than Snowflake. However, Snowflake has more functionality. Depending on the client's needs, we can recommend the best option. Firebolt is a relatively new technology. Snowflake has many functionalities. Firebolt does not support unloading data to S3. There is no built-in way to do this in Firebolt. Alternatively, the data can be retrieved using API calls and loaded to S3 manually. Data can be unloaded to S3 directly using Snowflake. Firebolt significantly improves our performance over Snowflake because it takes less time to execute queries. This is especially important for our company because we use some KPIs that require fast loading times.

One way to retrieve data from firewalls is to add query parameters to the connection string. For example, you can use the REST API to retrieve the security query. Some firewalls have been deployed to maintain them. 

They have a team we can contact if we have any queries or are facing difficulties. They try to solve our issues completely. Maintenance is relatively easy. We handle QA issues from our solution, but I’ve never faced any issues related to the firewall. One thing the firewall didn't have before was the ability to support data in different reviews. Before that, the firewall didn't have query parameters. Based on our requirements, we added a new feature to add query parameters with the connection strength. We can directly specify the connection strength that we want to access data, and we can access it. I suggest using a shared HPE client for all requests to the firewall API. This would save our app a lot of SQL and memory resources. It's a backend-related solution, but it would be a good one. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

What do you like best about the product?

It has great speed and performance. It allows me to handle large datasets and complex queries in a fraction of the time. It also offers a flexible pricing model, which allows me to pay only for the compute resources I actually use. This is very cost-effective for me as I have variable workloads and don't want to pay for unused capacity.

What do you dislike about the product?

I have been using firebolt for quite some time and till now I have enjoyed using it and its interface. As of now I dont think that there is something in Firebolt that I dont like about.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Traditional data warehouses are often slow and inefficient when it comes to querying and analyzing large amounts of data. But Firebolt solves this problem of mine by using a unique indexing technology and a cloud-native architecture that enables it to deliver fast query performance even on very large datasets.Traditional data warehouses are very expensive to set up and maintain, especially as data volumes grow. Firebolt's cloud-native approach and pay-as-you-go pricing model make it more cost-effective than traditional data warehouses, allowing me to save money while still getting the analytical insights I need.