Optimizes costs, works with various clouds, and great dashboards
What is our primary use case?
Data warehousing is typically a rich guys' toy. Large enterprises are only able to leverage data warehouses for data analytics purposes. We wanted to change that and wanted to build a data warehouse template model for businesses across industries.
If Snowflake was not around, we would have used Google's Big Query or Amazon's Redshift, or a MYSQL/Postgres database in a Windows VM (virtual machine). However, Snowflake made it a lot easier for us with loads of features such as encryption of data in motion and at rest, masking policies, time travel (to correct data load issues), controlled access based on roles, data sharing, third-party data from marketplaces, etc.
How has it helped my organization?
It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses.
About ten years ago, force.com from salesforce.com offered a similar platform for us to build data warehouses. However, our staff with a data engineering background found it easier to build the data warehouse in Snowflake, with the easy-to-use SQL interface and RBAC models (role-based access control). The platform saved us money as it automatically shuts down the compute engines after about five minutes of idle time. Per second billing (above the first minute) is great.
What is most valuable?
In my view, cost optimization for the computing power required by the ETL jobs, reports, and dashboards is the most valuable feature. Especially for startups, this helps us to keep cost spending within control without having to worry about manually shutting down the server when not used.
As a Google partner, we like to leverage GCP (Google Cloud Platform). Snowflake supports GCP, AWS & Azure platforms. This works just fine for us. Encryption of data with multiple keys for both data in transit and data at rest gives us enough confidence to use snowflake for our customer 360 solutions.
What needs improvement?
Currently, we use Snowsight only to monitor the usage of the Snowflake environment by our users. However, if Snowsight can be improved, we can host our BI (business intelligence) environment also within Snowflake. In our case, to provide basic reports and dashboards, we started to use Tableau, Power BI, Looker, and Qliksense, depending on our customer preference.
We are yet to figure out how to integrate tools, such as Liquibase, to release changes to our data warehouse model. If Snowflake could guide us with some easy-to-use integration (similar to DBT integration), that would be great.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution since 2020.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
How are customer service and support?
Support can be enabled in the Snowflake UI.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In the past, we used Google Cloud SQL. However, Snowflake offered cost optimization among the many other useful features. They also introduced app building on top of the data hosted.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is not difficult. Google Search will lead us to articles that can guide us on the setup of users, roles, warehouses, and access controls.
What about the implementation team?
We did the initial setup on our own, and it was not difficult.
What was our ROI?
We constantly monitor the usage with grafana dashboards to keep the ROI growing and to assist/ alert users about any wastage.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Many interesting features are available only in the enterprise edition. Check out the differences when you are evaluating the product: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/...
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We considered MySQL and Google Big Query. We're also happy with Google Big Query.
What other advice do I have?
Snowflake is growing with newer features and capabilities. But not much success with Stream lit app. Big query + app sheet is an alternative that we're considering.
Enjoy using snowflake but wish it was better
What do you like best about the product?
I like the overall interface of snowflake. I like the layout and it's easy to use. I love that it auto populates certain syntax words. I also love the query search feature.
What do you dislike about the product?
I don't like when someone shares a sheet with you , you aren't allowed to move it to another folder or stop sharing it.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I'm using it to query data
Excellent program for data warehouse
What do you like best about the product?
It's very easy to use and the platform for SQL queries has a very good design.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes the queries can suffer delay when you run it and you have to wait more than 1 hour if there are many users using it.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I needed to create queries that generates tables from the different databases in the program.
Flexible and scalable Cloud Data Warehouse
What do you like best about the product?
Simple to use UI that is constantly improving. Snowflake provides a scalable platform for our team to continue building our Data Lake and enrich it with data from external database shares & marketplace data
What do you dislike about the product?
I have no complaints about the platform itself. However, one area I wish was more flexible was around annual billing. If you do not renew at or above the previous year's credits, you lose the ability to rollover any used credits
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Snowflake allows us to aggregate data across various source systems into a central repository, join disparate datasets together and ultimately build reports in PowerBI for our stakeholders
Amazing Experience with Snowflake services .
What do you like best about the product?
The best thing about Snowflake is it's architecture , which provide flexibility like big data . Users can scale up or down as needed and pay for only the resources they use. Storage is billed by terabytes stored per month, and computation is billed on a per-second basis. Snowflake also has the capability to run JSON queries more efficiently.
What do you dislike about the product?
Snowflake support semi-structured and structured data. unstructured data support is not there currently. Snowflake is infinitely scalable , so I thing it should limit sometime , otherwise it lead to heavy bills .
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It Solved my data warehousing problem and performing analysis in that data . Also here I can Scale Snowflake service infinitly due to this our unit performance is also increased and so in profit .
Snowflake Review
What do you like best about the product?
Snowflake has a very intuitive interface and many useful features, such as the SQL that users can run on it. The statistics for the tables used is incredibly useful. The UI looks great and the organization between Database, Schema, and Table is great as well.
What do you dislike about the product?
It was difficult to add data to an empty table by uploading a csv. Sometimes it can is not easy to switch to another region due to the auto-login. Additionally, the folder organization for worksheets would have been a bit better for my use cases if it functioned more like a file explorer than most recently used and pure folders.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Snowflake is a cloud data warehouse that allows us to keep client data for operational reporting. Snowflake works well with our ETL tool and our BI tools. It is straightforward to use across our organization.
Good User Interface
What do you like best about the product?
it's very easy to understand and work on Snowflake the user interface and easy navigation is really helful
What do you dislike about the product?
some functions are a little difficult to understand
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Snowflake is really helpful in Data Storage and security
great data organizer for BI and data science
What do you like best about the product?
can manage big data very efficiently and easily
What do you dislike about the product?
sometime the data transfer can be little slow
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Helps store and analysis of big data in companies
One stop solution to view, analyze and generate reports
What do you like best about the product?
Helpful to get deep insights and simplicity of making a pipeline from various data sources, which helped us create a quicker business market decision for growth. The ability to work on multiple queries is impressive and it has control over the sharing and access capabilities.
What do you dislike about the product?
UI can be improved in terms of data visualization and catalog. Moreover, issue in importing and loading the bulk data
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Overall works well with structured data; managing and storing it is straightforward & fast. It allows us to run complex queries and deliver great insights with valuable data used for marketing. Even having limitations on sharing and accessing data proves security as a trusted platform. The ability to connect with different data sources or integration with tools is smooth.
Reliable product with good features and support
What do you like best about the product?
Apart from data storage it provides fast and easily accessible platform. It is way cheaper and reliable than Oracle services as it comes with pause feature for cluster when not in use.
What do you dislike about the product?
Materialized views are limited to table. Needs improvement in Inbuilt data lineage capabilities.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Compressed storage feature brings down business spends on data storage. It is well suited for client as many of them prefer to use multiple cloud service platform like GCP, Azure, AWS for different applications.
