Google Cloud Spanner vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google Cloud Spanner
Score 5.6 out of 10
N/A
Google Cloud Spanner is a cloud database-as-a-service product offered as a service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).N/A
Snowflake
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the eponymous data warehouse with, from the company in San Mateo, a cloud and SQL based DW that aims to allow users to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data in secure, governed, and compliant ways. With it, users can securely access the Data Cloud to share live data with customers and business partners, and connect with other organizations doing business as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers.N/A
Pricing
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Features
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Google Cloud Spanner
7.8
Ratings
11% below category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Automatic software patching8.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Database scalability8.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated backups10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Database security provisions5.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics5.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment7.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
7.4
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google Cloud SpannerSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a large relational database and it is growing fast on daily basis, and if you have a strong need in ACID across all your clusters, and most importantly, if you need to maintain high availability in a large region, Google Cloud Spanner can be a very good choice.
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If you need a quick query, snowflake is the way to go. It's super simple and scalable; we were struggling before with Azure, and with Snowflake, everything runs smoothly, and we have more control over our schemas and warehouses. Snowflake, in my opinion, is the next step when you want to scale your business and manage data. If your company is still small, there may be cheaper options.
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Pros
  • Super high availability
  • Scales automatically
  • High standard SLA
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  • Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs
  • Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources
  • Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors
  • Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time
  • Snowflake offers online training for various employee types
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Cons
  • Support for Views
  • Support for more databases (schemas).
  • More index types that can be supported (Functional)
  • Backups (ie table/data backup) if data is deleted or truncate by accident.
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  • Add constraints for views and not just for tables
  • Do not force customers to renew for same or higher amount to avoid loosing unused credits. Already paid credits should not expire (at least within a reasonable time frame), independent of renewal deal size.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to
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Usability
No answers on this topic
The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information.
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Alternatives Considered
Spanner scales quickly compared to Amazon RDS. Azure Database is about the same as well. MongoDB can scale to horizontal scalability, however, because Mongo doesn't support full ACID, Spanner comes into that aspect. GCP Cloud SQL not as scalable as Spanner. Spanner has more functionality than MongoDB and Amazon RDS & Azure Databases.
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Snowflake provides various features, such as integration with Python using Snowpark. The reporting feature that caters to your small reporting needs is Snowsight. The Snowflake data marketplace is where you can get multiple data for free and even some of the data which you can buy according to your needs. And the integration options with various tools like Sigma are add-ons.
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Return on Investment
  • Backups specifically if transactional data is deleted. Restoring made us lose time.
  • Sharding on Horizontal level was quick and easy. Deployment and increasing nodes is easy
  • Large dataset handling.
  • ACID compliance
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  • With separate compute and storage feature, the queries get executed quickly and it improves our overall productivity.
  • Earlier we were using a different product for analytical purposes, but with Snowflake's in-built analytical feature we are now able to save money.
  • Snowflake is cost efficient, features like auto suspend for compute resources helped to control the costs.
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ScreenShots

Snowflake Screenshots

Screenshot of Snowflake Installation