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.
Snowflake Data Cloud [Private Offer Only]
Carahsoft Technology Corp.External reviews
10 reviews
from
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Has good documentation and query time is less compared to other tools
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with the product for four years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The tool is scalable. I've used it for datasets with more than ten million records.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Users can pay as they use and not worry about the maintenance of the data warehouse
What is our primary use case?
The solution has use cases related to retail stores and sales.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
The solution’s pricing could be cheaper. It would be helpful if Snowflake could create good reports instead of using Power BI reports.
For how long have I used the solution?
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Snowflake is a scalable solution. We have four to five customers for Snowflake who use it regularly.
How was the initial setup?
The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
The solution's deployment in a development environment takes only a couple of minutes.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Users have to pay a licensing fee for the solution, which is expensive.
What other advice do I have?
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.
The product enables users to import data quickly from different sources, but exporting data to third-party solutions is difficult
What is our primary use case?
The solution is very good for building data warehouses. However, it has some limitations if we need it for more use cases.
What is most valuable?
All the features of the product that are needed for the data warehouse are good. The solution enables the ingestion of data and the usability of preferred languages while creating the data. The performance of the engine is good. The solution speeds up the process of onboarding. We can connect to different sources and get the data very fast.
The tool does a very good job in reporting and data transformation. We can adapt it well to our needs. When we try to ingest data from many sources, it helps harmonize the data sources. It also helps with duplication and cleaning of the data. It is a pretty difficult and time-consuming task, and Snowflake helps us with it.
What needs improvement?
I do not like the proprietary format of the solution. Getting data out of the tool to third-party applications is difficult. The data science workloads must be improved. Snowflake has a lot to learn. There are better options in the market for data science.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for almost three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The tool is stable. I rate the stability a nine or ten out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
If we need to scale up, it will impact our costs. I work in a consulting company. We have a department dedicated to Snowflake. We have seven to eight people on our team. Our clients were medium-sized businesses with 1000 employees. They are focused on data analytics solutions. They also have departments for Azure and AWS. I rate the tool’s scalability a seven or eight out of ten.
How was the initial setup?
I rate the ease of setup a seven or eight out of ten. The tool is deployed on the cloud. The time taken for deployment depends on the workload and how we build it.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten.
What other advice do I have?
We are partners. The impact of the solution’s automatic scaling feature on the workload depends on how we build our workload. The vendor must take a look at the market and how technologies evolve. The solution can do more in the area of distributed systems. If our use cases require data scientists, I rate the tool a three or four out of ten. I rate the tool a nine or ten out of ten for SQL data warehouse use cases. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.
The product is fast and easy to use, but it is expensive compared to other products in the market
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution extensively for reporting and analytics. We put data into it and publish reports. A report could be a dashboard. The data is used for data-driven insights and AI and MLOps. There are many use cases for the data that we procure on Snowflake.
How has it helped my organization?
The product has impacted collaboration across our teams. The correlation is quite easy. We use the solution because most of our life sciences and healthcare customers prefer it. Their preferences directly impact us as vendors and partners. We have to promote the same tools and technology they are familiar with.
What is most valuable?
The product is quite fast. There are several connectors in Snowflake that we could leverage for ingesting data. The data could be in zettabytes or petabytes. It is easily manageable.
What needs improvement?
The cost is a bit high. The storage cost and the extraction cost of data are high. The final invoicing cost will be higher if we do a rich data-oriented task on Snowflake.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for close to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The tool is stable and very powerful.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have at least 1000 users in our organization. We will surely use the product in the future.
How was the initial setup?
The solution is cloud-based. There is no on-premise solution. It has its own cloud. The installation is quite easy.
What was our ROI?
The solution is worth the money. It is good to use. It has a lot of features which are not available in other products. However, users must explore other products to control their costs.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Other products like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure have competitive pricing. Snowflake costs 15 to 20% more than AWS and Microsoft Azure.
What other advice do I have?
People who want to buy the product must initially use the free trial version. It can be installed on a desktop. The user can do a lot of R&D. We have a good playground. We can play with the components and learn them easily. We can learn how each component talks to each other, how the performance is, and how to create tables. There are a ton of tasks we can do.
After ingesting the data, we can perform advanced analytics and make models. The end users can do many things on the tool. It is quite an easy tool. I will advise any new user to install a free version. They will be able to learn about the product and get good insights when they work on their pilot project. Overall, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.
A scalable and cost-effective solution that stores data streamed from the source system
What is our primary use case?
We use Snowflake as a database to store all the data we stream from the source system.
What is most valuable?
The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power. If I want to change the computation with other tools like Netezza, I would have to add a hard disk to it. With Snowflake, being on the AWS side, changing warehouses provides me with faster execution of my queries.
What needs improvement?
The real-time streaming feature is limited with Snowflake and could be improved.
Currently, Snowflake doesn't support unstructured data. With Snowflake, you need to be very particular about the type of data in your source systems. It has to be in a proper structure. You cannot push data to Snowflake in any possible way.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Snowflake for a couple of years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Snowflake is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Around 400 users are using the solution in our organization.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used IBM Netezza. We switched to Snowflake in 2020 because it provided us control over its scalability and costing model.
How was the initial setup?
The solution’s initial setup is comparatively easier.
What was our ROI?
Snowflake is a cloud-based, scalable solution that provides strong data security. Handling all the data is much easier in Snowflake, and it has a very nice interface to control user access. The administration of Snowflake is also comparatively easier.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Snowflake is a cost-effective solution.
What other advice do I have?
Choosing Snowflake completely depends on the quantum of data your organization has and the requirements. Snowflake is suitable for someone looking for a scalable and cost-effective solution that provides quick analysis.
Overall, I rate Snowflake a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Stable product with good analytics features
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
The product's performance could be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Snowflake for a couple of months. We are using the latest version.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
It is very fast and the performance is great but has some technical quirks
What is our primary use case?
I use it for data warehousing. I just design databases, put data in there, and get data out.
What is most valuable?
Although I haven't used it much, it is very fast and the performance is great.
What needs improvement?
It has some technical quirks that whoever is using it needs to be aware of. It doesn't enforce typical relational database constraints. If you're not aware of that, you can really put some bad data in there.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using it for about three months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would give it a ten out of ten. I haven't seen it failover.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I've never had any issues with it. It is being extensively used. We have between a hundred and a thousand users using Snowflake.
How are customer service and support?
I have not had any experience with customer support, but I've heard it's good.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I've heard it's quite expensive.
What other advice do I have?
I would give Snowflake a seven out of ten.
Easy to manage with lots of features and good reliability
What is our primary use case?
The solution is primarily used for data warehousing.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for two and a half years or so. I haven't used it for too long.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Has good stability and processes the data efficiently
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution for data storage and integration purposes.
What is most valuable?
The solution's most valuable feature is path application.
What needs improvement?
They should improve the performance of the solution's transaction application.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have 20-30 solution users in our organization.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's customer service is good.
How was the initial setup?
The solution's initial setup was very straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price for the solution's license depends on the use cases.
What other advice do I have?
I recommend the solution to others and rate it as a nine. It efficiently processes the data and gets reports as well.
Good scalability and has a simple query process
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution to build the pipelines in stream sets, including data source, data warehouse, and destination endpoints.
What is most valuable?
The solution's most valuable features are storage, run time, scalability, and minimum query time compared to other vendors.
What needs improvement?
The solution's stability needs improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for seven or eight months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I rate the solution's scalability as a nine.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We use Hive and Hadoop as well. Snowflake is more stable and scalable.
What other advice do I have?
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.
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