My main use case for Snowflake is building ETL pipelines and ad-hoc analytics on data that we have. A specific example of a pipeline and ad-hoc analytics task I have worked on using Snowflake involves working in both Snowflake and Tableau to build BI analytics solutions for our customers and for the company. Every Tableau report needs a data source which is built in Snowflake. This means that we perform analysis where our raw data is located. Then we aggregate it, building queries that query other queries. The data source that Tableau is consuming can have the data that is needed.
Snowflake AI Data Cloud
SnowflakeExternal reviews
761 reviews
from
and
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Building transparent BI pipelines has improved collaboration across departments
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
Snowflake offers a user-friendly interface that is native and to some extent simple. You do not need a lot of time to find features you need to use. I would also mention scalability as one of the best features. Additionally, what Snowflake is doing around AI with the Cortex solution looks quite powerful, even though we do not currently use it.
Snowflake has impacted my organization positively mainly in terms of collaboration and transparency. We have multiple departments, so we do not have free access to other teams or departments' knowledge base. However, the fact that we can see what is happening in Snowflake from other departments and teams helps our team build quality reporting.
What needs improvement?
Snowflake can be improved in terms of its recent switch to a new user interface, which feels less intuitive compared to the old one. Moving to this new interface is something that I would like to see presented in a different way.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Snowflake for a bit more than two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Snowflake is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Regarding scalability, we do not usually think about problems around it, which means that Snowflake is performing very well on this front.
How are customer service and support?
I have not needed to engage with customer support since Snowflake is a native, intuitive solution. I cannot really answer this question.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I did not previously use a different solution; Snowflake was the solution here from the beginning.
How was the initial setup?
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 historical data is that we monitor it from time to time. Since nobody is asking, we feel that we are doing fine with the money we spend on our calculations.
What was our ROI?
At this point, we have not seen a return on investment. However, we are having conversations about allowing new users to try Snowflake and some features, such as Cortex agents. It would be better to revisit this question in a month or two.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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 historical data is that we monitor it from time to time. Since nobody is asking, we feel that we are doing fine with the money we spend on our calculations.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
It is difficult for me to give an answer regarding evaluating other options before choosing Snowflake because I was not in this organization when it began to operate. This means I do not know the full history behind this decision.
What other advice do I have?
My advice for others looking into using Snowflake is to try it out for yourself and allow different types of employees to use it. For example, project managers or people who are not technical should also be allowed to try it out, even if they do not have SQL or Python knowledge.
From my experience, Snowflake is the most stable, user-friendly, and simply the nicest tool that I have been working with, and I have had experience working with many databases and different solutions. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.
Snowflake’s Multi-Cluster Warehouses Handled Our Flash Sale Spike Effortlessly
What do you like best about the product?
Last November we launched a Flash Sale promo and our transaction volume jumped 800 percent in two hours. Our old warehouse setup would have queued queries for minutes. But Snowflake's multi cluster warehouse feature is a lifesaver. We set max clusters to 5 on our Small warehouse and it automatically spin up extra clusters when the concurrency spiked.There was no failed queries and no throttling. The best part was that after the sale ended it scaled back down on its own.
What do you dislike about the product?
Debugging nested JSON parsing errors is a nightmare when you are in hurry. Last month we ingested webhook events from Stripe and some records had missing fields that caused NULL explosions in our downstream models. I spent four hours tracing it to one malformed event out of two million.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We used to wast lot of time in capacity planning until we didn't have to do it anymore. Now with automatic scaling and separate compute for different workloads i just spin up dedicated warehouses for ETL dbt runs and Looker dashboards. 2 week brfore our fraud team needed to backtest a new model on 9 months of raw transaction logs. I threw them on a Large warehouse they finished in 11 minutes and nobody else even noticed which was big achievment for us.
Snowflake: A Powerful Central Data Repository for Real-Time Analytics
What do you like best about the product?
Snowflake serves as central repository directory for both structured and unstructured data. It offers full data accessibility which enhances intelligence decision-making for our business in real-time. It is one of the most powerful tools in the enterprise that generates efficient analytics with reliable data visualization capabilities.
What do you dislike about the product?
We experience some errors from data configurations sometimes due to low multi-cloud data handling capabilities. Snowflake has done excellent work in most scenarios by handling our data efficiently.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Our company has experienced exceptional growth from secure cloud database management by Snowflake. It has empowered my team to create reports and blend data from many sources without requiring external database. It has systematic model that separates compute and storage data to streamline different workloads.
Snowflake’s Cortex AI Makes an Already Powerful Data Platform Even Better
What do you like best about the product?
Snowflake is the most powerful data tool right now . It's not limited to data warehouse now . With the current ai capabilities specially cortex like cortex analyst ,cortex agents , ai sql functions this is now an end to end platform for all data things . Specially the cortex code is life changing for etl pipelines,debugging etc.
What do you dislike about the product?
I think they are shipping a lot of ai features which are great but still need fine tuning and improvements on that . Sometimes they hallucinate and gets a little frustrating . Also I think cortex analyst was pretty expensive so cost sometimes is a downside .
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Snowflake helps us in a lot of work and really like all the features like time travel ,snowflake streams , stages to load data , different warehouse to handle the workloads etc. Also it allows for seamless integration with external systems like braze , dbt projects etc.
Dynamic masking in Snowflake made role-based access fast and centralized
What do you like best about the product?
We needed to restrict access based on project roles and fast. That's when i fell for dynamic masking. We applied masking policies directly on columns in Snowflake, no messing with ETL no separate staging tables. I literally wrote ALTER TABLE .... ADD MASKING POLICY and it just worked. Within two days auditors saw masked data while our BI team saw full values. The best part of it was It's all centralized in the account.
What do you dislike about the product?
At the start we actually struggled with time travel billing. We enabled 90day retention just to be safe because our legal team wanted it. Then our monthly bill spiked. Turns out restoring a table from 70 days ago costs storage even if you never query it. Nobody explained that clearly during the training.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Last month our DPO asked for a data flow map to a new reinsurance partner. I joined tag references with query history and had an answer in 20 minutes. That used to take two days. Plus because Snowflake supports row level security natively we stopped building fragile views for every department. That never happened in our old stack.
Easy Data Movement, Smooth Scaling, and Solid Performance in Snowflake
What do you like best about the product?
Snowflake makes data movement easy, and scaling compute for heavier workloads is straightforward without requiring much manual tuning. It also helps me keep data secure and I don’t have to worry about provisoning servers or APIs. The Cloud storage setup in Snowflake feels well desgined and I’ve consistently seen solid performace. I also like the integration features and it continues to work well even when the whole team is using it at the same time. The setup process process has been smooth and practical and having the option with both SQL and Python has been great.
What do you dislike about the product?
Small files can hurt performance, but otherwise data pipelines can faster and cut overalltime. The compute is most useful when it stays simple, efficient, easy to mange and straightforward to operate.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Snowflake centralised our data. Reducea issues and improved consistency across our reporting and analytics. It has also streamlined workflows and prevented many of the problems we user to run into when managing reports, especially when working to tight timelines. The capabilities have been useful and it performa extremely well when handling window functions and workloa isolation. It reduces adat problema through integrations and helped us deliver excellent results.
Versatile Data Platform with Outstanding Time Travel, Needs Better Ingestion Tools
What do you like best about the product?
I feel the time travel feature in Snowflake is outstanding because it retains all the updates and deletions to the data for up to 90 days, allowing me to easily roll back to any previous version of the data. This feature is particularly helpful in rectifying any old data load or bad data load, especially when dealing with instances of stale data being loaded. Additionally, the Snowflake team has been really helpful during the initial onboarding and setup process, making sure everything went as smoothly as possible.
What do you dislike about the product?
I think Snowflake Openflow is a pretty new tool for data ingestion launched mid or late last year and it does not provide a very user friendly experience for creating dataflows. It has different processors and processor groups that help us achieve the necessary data transformations and loading however their configuration is still quite complicated. Another place where it lags is there is not inbuilt alerting for pipeline/dataflow failures and one has to create a work around for a simple alert. Overall, the pipeline building experience is not at all user friendly and requires a lot of effort in the process.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use Snowflake to consolidate scattered data from AWS and Azure, helping us clean, transform, and load data efficiently. The time travel feature allows us to fix data loading issues by rolling back tables to previous states, ensuring data integrity.
Snowflake Makes Heavy Queries and Zero-Copy Cloning Effortless
What do you like best about the product?
Our marketing data was split across Salesforce, Google Ads and a legacy Postgres db. I remember spending two whole days just trying to join three tables. Then we moved to Snowflake and surprisingly the separation of storage and compute clicked for me. I can run a heavy query on five years of clickstream data without worry about some dashboard slowing down. I really like Zero copy cloning. No kidding i cloned a 2TB production table in seconds just to test a new attribution model.
What do you dislike about the product?
Web UI feels sluggish. I know everyone uses VS Code or SnowSQL but sometimes i just want to peek at a table quickly. That interface hangs more than i'd like. Its annoying sometime when you are in a flow state and the browser tab decides to take a coffee break.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
One big shift i noticed after a few months is that we stopped arguing about whose query was blocking whom. Before Snowflake we had this clumsy ETL that ran at midnight and failed maybe twice a week. Now because compute scales independently our daily transformation runs in 12 minutes instead of 90. That means i actually have time to iterate. The other benefit is we cut our data warehouse bill by about 30 percent just by auto suspending warehouses.
Smooth Scheduled Models and Clean Dashboard-Ready Data with dbt
What do you like best about the product?
It works really well with tools like power BI and looker. I use dbt to run scheduled models and push clean, ready to use tables directly into dashboards which keeps everything running smoothly. Sharing data across teams is straightforward and there's no heavy maintenance to worry about. Overall data organization and management feel solid consistently well handled.
What do you dislike about the product?
At first the cost tracking isn't very clear, so it's easy to overspend especially if queries keep running in the background without you noticing, that said the interface itself is straightforward and once you're in its easy to navigate and find what you need.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It replaced several reporting databases for us. Now everything runs through a single data warehouse, which reduces duplication and keeps our data far more consistent. It's also helped us avoid reporting errors and overall it has made managing our analytics workflows much easier.
Effortless Large-Scale Data Analytics with Flexible Compute and Storage
What do you like best about the product?
how easy it makes handling large-scale data without worrying too much about infrastructure. You don’t have to think about provisioning or tuning servers, you just focus on the data and queries.
The separation of compute and storage is a big win
The separation of compute and storage is a big win
What do you dislike about the product?
cost visibility and control. It’s very easy to spin up warehouses and run queries, but if you’re not careful, costs can grow quickly without it being obvious in real time.Also, for smaller or simpler use cases, it can feel like overkill.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
managing and scaling data infrastructure without a lot of operational overhead. Before using it, handling large datasets, running analytics queries, and keeping pipelines stable required a lot more effort around provisioning, tuning, and maintenance.The biggest benefit is that it saves time and reduces complexity.
showing 21 - 30