Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
$0.24
per GB per month
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
Amazon Redshift
Snowflake
Editions & Modules
Redshift Managed Storage
$0.24
per GB per month
Current Generation
$0.25 - $13.04
per hour
Previous Generation
$0.25 - $4.08
per hour
Redshift Spectrum
$5.00
per terabyte of data scanned
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Redshift
Snowflake
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Redshift
Snowflake
TrustRadius Insights
Amazon Redshift
Snowflake
Highlights
Research Team Insight
Published
Amazon Redshift and Snowflake are both data warehouse software designed to store data for querying, analysis, and extraction. Mid-sized businesses are the most frequent users of both data warehouse solutions. Large enterprises are more likely to use Snowball, likely due to its ability to work with many types of data. Smaller businesses tend to use Amazon Redshift due to its usability and affordable pricing.
Features
Amazon Redshift and Snowflake both offer essential data warehouse features, including storage and querying data, but they also have some standout features that set them apart.
Amazon Redshift provides end-to-end encryption and highly customizable security features at all price points. Additionally, Amazon Redshift offers many integrations with other technologies, particularly with technologies on the AWS platform. Lastly, Amazon Redshift requires less technical expertise to use as it has a usable interface and secure backup features.
Snowflake provides native support for JSON documents, allowing for built-in functions and querying for JSON data. Additionally, Snowflake includes robust automation tools for data vacuuming and compression, which can save time for users. Lastly, Snowflake can handle complex data types like arrays and objects, making it a great choice for businesses with a lot of complex data.
Limitations
Though Amazon Redshift and Snowflake both offer robust data warehouse features, they also have some limitations that are important to consider.
Amazon Redshift has limited JSON support. By default, it splits all JSON data into strings, which can make it difficult to query and analyze. Database management for Amazon Redshift mostly has to be handled manually, as opposed to Snowflakes automation features. Lack of automation may make Amazon Redshift a poor choice for companies with small technical teams that can benefit from automation. Lastly, Amazon Redshift provides limited support for complex data types like arrays and objects.
Snowflake offers advanced security features, but they are not available at every price point. Users with small data storage needs, but important security needs may struggle to find the right Snowflake package for them. Snowflake also lacks the seamless AWS technology integrations that Amazon Redshift provides. Businesses with few technical staff members may also struggle with Snowflake’s user interface and backup features.
Pricing
Amazon Redshift offers a two-month trial where users can see if they like the technology before purchasing. Beyond the trial, Amazon Redshift is priced depending on storage needs and feature requirements. Pricing can start as low as $0.25 per hour, and reach as high as $13.04 per hour.
Snowflake offers a one-month free trial for users to try the software. Pricing for Snowflake is dependent on storage needs, platform, and geographic region and starts as low as $2.00 per hour. Snowflake includes scaling pricing based on workload, so a business with a rapidly changing workload may have some savings with Snowflake.
If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
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.
Redshift is fully managed. Small teams do not have the resources to maintain a cluster. CloudWatch metrics are provided out-of-the-box, and it is easy to configure alarms.
Redshift's console allows you to easily inspect and manage queries, and manage the performance of the cluster.
Redshift is ubiquitous; many products (e.g., ETL services) integrate with it out-of-the-box.
Writing .csvs to S3 and querying them through Redshift Spectrum is convenient.
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
It could benefit from adding data integrity and programming tools common to other database management systems.
Amazon Redshift is based on PostgreSQL 8.0.2. That version of PostgreSQL was released in December 2006. While PostgreSQL was much improved since then, the new features were not implemented in Redshift. Many basic features are missing from it.
Primary keys can be declared but not enforced. Referential integrity (foreign keys) can be declared but not enforced. UNIQUE and CHECK constraints are not supported and cannot be declared.
IDENTITY can be declared on a column, and Redshift will put unique values into it. However: IDENTITY values in the newly inserted rows won’t be incremental or sequential. To implement a sequential number, you need to write your own custom code.
There are no stored procedures in Redshift. We are writing SQL script files, and then parsing and running them one statement at a time from a Python program. This also enabled us to implement execution-time error logging.
In SQL scripts, to check for the row count of affected rows, a complicated join query against some system tables or views has to be executed.
Data Control Language (DCL) does not exist. No statements like IF, WHILE, DO, RAISERROR, etc.
On performance of views… Views do not “pass-through” a query parameter which is a potential problem for performance.
When selecting against a view with the WHERE clause outside of the view, the inner query of the view will be executed first without consideration for the WHERE clause, and only then the WHERE clause will be applied.
Certain clauses of SQL work many times faster than other clauses. So be careful and test your statements for performance earlier rather than later, especially if working with a large data set.
There was a situation when DELETE FROM JOIN was unacceptably slow. Replacing JOIN with the USING clause made DELETE instantaneous.
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.
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
Overall it serves all our aspects of data management like data cleaning, data manipulation, and data reporting on the cloud platform. We can create stored procedures and triggers in it very easily as all the options are self suggested in it. We can easily attach the results of ARS to the other tools as well for drawing the statistical results.
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.
The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support
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.
We evaluated [Amazon] Redshift vs BigQuery vs Amazon EMR, back in 2014. Back then BigQuery cost was slightly higher than that of [Amazon] Redshift price structure. Amazon EMR, needs lots more management (Admin tasks) and EMR is designed to be ephemeral and not designed to be a data store. [Amazon] Redshift was ideal with the price structure, performance and ROI[.]
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.
