Snowflake Information Reviews & Insights

Score8.9 out of 10

373 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Snowflake are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Intuitive User Interface: Users have consistently praised Snowflake's intuitive and easy-to-use interface, with many stating that it is beginner-friendly. The drag and drop feature for tables into queries has been particularly helpful for users when writing complex queries.

Advanced Security Features: Snowflake's security features have received high praise from users, who feel confident in connecting with numerous business partners due to the platform's advanced security measures and effective programming. This positive sentiment indicates that Snowflake successfully prioritizes data protection and privacy.

Seamless Data Integration: Users appreciate Snowflake's ability to integrate, analyze, and transfer data from multiple clouds. They find it easy to have a transparent idea about data extraction and transfer. This feature allows users to efficiently work with their diverse datasets across different cloud platforms without any hassle or complications.

Snowflake Reviews

14 Reviews

InformationComputer Software4Internet4Telecommunications1Information Services2Computer Games2Media Production1

Scalable cloud data warehouse with fair pricing

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 17, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Snowflake as our central data warehouse where we collect raw data from various different source systems and combine, harmonize, and transform them into reporting-ready formats. This helps us to better understand behavioral patterns amongst our customers, better understand the financials, the usage of our products, Go To Market strategies etc.

Pros

Scalability and Performance
Auto-Suspend and Auto-Resume
Ingestion of Real-Time data via Snowpipe

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Very well suited for small and large scenarios. Very well suited for structured and semi-structured (e.g. JSON) data. Maybe less ideal for photo / video materials as there are cheaper storage alternatives.

Verified User

Professional (Computer Software company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Snowflake the MPP data platform of the future, today!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 10, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Snowflake is used as a scale-out data lake and data warehouse at Spireon. The separation of compute from storage enables the company to provide timely and scalable insights. The confluence of streaming and batch processing at a pay-as-you-go pricing model aids in being intelligent and efficient on budget planning and use.

Pros

Massive parallel processing
SQL for schema-on-read data lakes
Secure and compressed storage for semi-structured data

Cons

Support site
Transparency on performance
Full text search

Likelihood to Recommend

Cloud based analytical data store type workloads where data is volumous and query access patterns are well-known is Snowflake's sweet spot. The MPP engine is second to none and being able to scale up or down on demand enables queries that weren't previously possible. Where Snowflake isn't particularly suited is for on-premise or smaller data workloads or transactional processing workloads.

dave withers

Sr Director in Engineering at Spireon (Information Services, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

This Snowflake is Unique, Fast and High Performing

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 2, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Snowflake was our data warehousing solution of choice, which we migrated from Treasure Data. It is used across the whole organization. It is used as a source of data for the entire organization, powering our dashboards and machine learning solutions.

Pros

Computation is handled under the hood, freeing resources that would be used for maintainence of clusters
Handling large data scale and ingestion
Ability to query large volumes of data with speed due to their unique architecture

Cons

Snowflake UI can be clunky and breaks sometimes, which can be annoying
Snowflake has to be paired with the Data Build Tool (DBT) to allow for templating and macro usage. No inbuilt solution.
Snowflake Python connector development doesn't necessarily track popular packages such as Pandas as quickly as Pandas releases
Could do with better machine learning capability over warehouse tables, but I assume this is coming soon

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake is a powerful warehousing solution and suits companies with large scale of data. It helps with fast querying of data, and there is little need to manage computation, since it is managed for you.

However, it does require a dedicated team and an upfront cost in setting up an structuring the warehouse. Some solutions such as AWS's Redshift or GCP's Bigquery could be a better alternatives if is already within the AWS or GCP ecosystem. Bigquery in particular has a low upfront cost and a better pricing model.

Verified User

Engineer (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Best Analytics Database in existence

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 30, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Powers our entire data warehouse

Pros

storage
compute
query time
admin maintenance

Cons

lack of multiple indexes
indexing by primary key is non performant

Likelihood to Recommend

Best analytics database in existence.
Able to be setup and administered by a lightly technical SQL user !
Performance performance performance
Able to query terabytes of data in seconds

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Internet company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

The Snowflake data cloud is the most complete cloud data platform

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 7, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Snowflake is a modern cloud data platform that InterWorks refers, resells, and implements for our data analytics clients. We also use it to back our internal data analytics initiatives within InterWorks. Customers of ours use Snowflake across every vertical and industry for any problem where they need an efficient, easy to use, scalable data environment.

Pros

Snowflake is very easy to use and doesn't have heavy DBA overhead.
Snowflake's ability to separate storage and compute is a radical departure from how databases of the past were built.
Snowflake is very easy for customers to scale as their needs shrink and grow.

Cons

Snowflake still has room to grow in the advanced analytics use cases with the addition of Python, Scala, or Java running natively on Snowflake virtual warehouses.
Snowflake can be somewhat unintuitive for customers coming from a prior RDBMS background because some of the concepts are such a radical departure.
Snowflake is still not especially suited for many database use cases, such as OLTP scenarios. It's hard to call this a con, since that's obviously not what the product was designed for, but users should be aware.

Likelihood to Recommend

Specific scenarios where Snowflake is very strong include analytical data processing scenarios. Snowflake is wonderful at inexpensively consolidating and storing data and allowing very fast access to that data while maintaining a low cost profile with it's ability to automatically resume and suspend virtual warehouses.

Snowflake is less suited to transaction processing scenarios and isn't a best choice to back up an online order processing system.

Brian Bickell

Data Practice Director in Engineering at InterWorks (Information Services, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

5 years of experience

View profile

Snowflake Review

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 21, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used by the whole company. We went with Snowflake because it is faster than Vertica and easier to manage different warehouses with.

Pros

Great for managing different warehouses.
Quick and efficient.

Cons

graph function on snowsight is still very preliminary

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake is very efficient for my company, and it's very easy to assign and manage different warehouses with it.

Verified User

Analyst in Marketing (Internet company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Extremely fast and efficient data warehouse tool.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 31, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Snowflake was implemented around 6 months ago to replace Redshift as the SQL level that allows us to query our data. Snowflake enables us to query our data quickly and effectively to get insights into various aspects of the program as well as various aspects of our users' behavior. It allows us to make smarter business decisions by making that data more readily available and reliable than our previous solution was.

Pros

Resources that scale up and down automatically to ensure that queries run quickly and efficiently without paying for computing power that is not being used
Much more reliable than our previous software
No noticable limit to query size
Runs very quickly

Cons

The SQL syntax used is different from Redshift in a number of ways. Would be nice to have more readily available help documentation around the differences built into the system.
Would be awesome of there was a way to see relations between tables more effectively.

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake is great when you need to store large amounts of data while retaining the ability to query that data quickly. It is very reliable and allows for auto-scaling on large queries meaning that you're only paying for the power you actually use. It's taken queries that took 20+ minutes to run on redshift down to 2 minutes on Snowflake.

Jake Schlingman

Product Manager in Product Management at AppFolio, Inc. (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

View profile

Snowflake's ease of use allows you to focus on what matters most - the data you're filling it with

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 10, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company adopted Snowflake as our first cloud-based data warehouse. It is being used as a central repository for all company data from each business unit for the purposes of business intelligence.

Pros

Ease of use
Separation of storage and compute resources
Simple to scale up or down with virtual warehouses
Built-in support for the most popular data formats
Standard SQL dialect
Robust function library

Cons

Lacks support for common table expressions
Lacks support for correlated subqueries
Better technical support for customer identified bugs
Clearer pricing model

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake architecture was designed at its foundation to take advantage of the cloud and then adds some unique benefits that support ease of use and increased productivity. The most popular cloud data warehouse platforms are all powerful tools and solid choices. With an investment in one of these, what really matters is how productive will you be using the data warehouse.

Snowflake's 'data-warehouse-as-a-service' model lessens the maintenance tasks of optimization/tuning that have traditionally fallen to DBAs and ETL developers. There are no servers to manage, software to install, or indexes to tune. This allows data engineers and analysts to focus more exclusively on analytic tasks that will translate into growth for the company.

While Snowflake doesn’t have all the performance optimization bells and whistles of other cloud data warehouse platforms, this is actually a good thing and that most people don't really need all of them or miss them. Using Snowflake on the whole means less knob-turning and futzing with setup/tweaking. Snowflake has its query optimizer already built-in.

Andrew Goss

Data Engineer in Engineering at Interfolio (Internet, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Great DW tool!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 27, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Snowflake for basic data munging from OLTP databases, APIs, etc. It is only used in our sizable Data department. It solves the problem of spinning up and managing a DW quickly without dedicated DBA support.

Pros

A nice UI with options to see the SQL/Code to automate steps in the UI.
Has great SQL features like LISTAGG or Count Distinct, which go above and beyond Oracle and MS SQL.
It's very fast!

Cons

The SQL editor. The worksheets are nice, but code editors today have auto-fill, debug highlighters, etc. They are working on this I'm told.
Worksheets (where you edit SQL) cannot be exported today.
Occasionally a bug is introduced during releases. It's no big deal.

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake is great for quick dirty analysis.

Eric Fischer

Senior Product Manager - Data Solutions in Engineering at Accruent (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 14, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Snowflake is being used across our whole organization. It addresses the need to combine disparate data sources into one single data source and discover insights into our business that would not be easily possible with lots of disconnected data sources. It also delivers world-class query performance and the ability for different business divisions to query their own data quickly and create reports in a fraction of the time as opposed to a traditional data warehouse solution. We are also using it to drive machine learning, and the data scientists are gaining insights into our business data that would not be possible otherwise. It is addressing multiple business problems, from distribution of our products all the way through to billing.

Pros

Reporting queries run in a fraction of the time that they would in our production systems. For example, we can take the original MS SQL reporting queries , that used to take hours to run in our OLTP databases, and convert it into snow SQL, and run almost the exact same query in Snowflake in minutes, if not seconds.
Having all our different data sources in one data warehouse database means we can start looking for links between data sources and different business units to tie all our data together. We can see from when a customer was dialled, through to when/if they bought a product, to when they were actually billed, and identify where in the process we are most efficient, and where we can improve our services and product offerings.
Having a truly automated database system, without the need to create indices or maintain them, means we can spend more time in gaining insights into our data and getting actual results/data out, rather than spending time managing and maintaining the solution.

Cons

There is no easy way to schedule any type of task.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need a totally managed cloud data warehouse solution that is as fast as lightning, then snowflake is for you.
I would not use it for any OLTP production type of solution.

Wicks Justin

Senior Data Engineer in Information Technology at Ignition Group (Telecommunications, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 14, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Reporting queries run in a fraction of the time that they would in our production systems. For example, we can take the original MS SQL reporting queries , that used to take hours to run in our OLTP databases, and convert it into snow SQL, and run almost the exact same query in Snowflake in minutes, if not seconds.
Having all our different data sources in one data warehouse database means we can start looking for links between data sources and different business units to tie all our data together. We can see from when a customer was dialled, through to when/if they bought a product, to when they were actually billed, and identify where in the process we are most efficient, and where we can improve our services and product offerings.
Having a truly automated database system, without the need to create indices or maintain them, means we can spend more time in gaining insights into our data and getting actual results/data out, rather than spending time managing and maintaining the solution.

Cons

There is no easy way to schedule any type of task.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need a totally managed cloud data warehouse solution that is as fast as lightning, then snowflake is for you.
I would not use it for any OLTP production type of solution.

Wicks Justin

Senior Data Engineer in Information Technology at Ignition Group (Telecommunications, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile