We performed a comparison between Amazon Redshift and Snowflake based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cloud Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I find the most valuable features to be the MPP style of processing, which mostly all of the data warehouses provide. The ability to integrate all other AWS services, such as NSS and S3, with little effort is very helpful. The service is well maintained, there are update patches frequently."
"I have primarily used the Redshift Spectrum feature and found it most valuable."
"It's very easy to migrate from other databases to Redshift. There are migration tools dedicated for this purpose, enabling migration from other databases like MS SQL directly to Redshift. The majority of the scripts will be automatically transposed."
"The stability of Amazon Redshift is good."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability, as it grows according to our needs."
"The most valuable features are that it's easy to set up and easy to connect the many tools that connect to it."
"Redshift COPY command, because much of my work involved helping customers migrate large amounts of data into Redshift."
"I like the cost-benefit ratio, meaning that it is as easy to use as it is powerful and well-performing."
"The feature that is really striking is the ability to translate the SQL workloads into the NoSQL version that can be used by Snowflake."
"The ability to share the data and the ability to scale up and down easily are the most valuable features. The concept of data sharing and data plumbing made it very easy to provide and share data. The ability to refresh your Dev or QA just by doing a clone is also valuable. It has the dynamic scale up and scale down feature. Development and deployment are much easier as compared to other platforms where you have to go through a lot of stuff. With a tool like DBT, you can do modeling and transformation within a single tool and deploy to Snowflake. It provides continuous deployment and continuous integration abilities. There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only get charged for your usage. You only pay for what you use. When we share the data downstream with business partners, we can specifically create compute for them, and we can charge back the business."
"The snapshot feature is good, the rollback feature is good and the interface is user-friendly."
"The tool is very easy to use. The solution’s desktop features are also very easy to use. Also, the product’s SQL-based connectivity is also good. It can connect with any tool."
"Its performance is a big advantage. When you run a query, its performance is very good. The inbound and outbound share features are also very useful for sharing a particular database. By using these features, you can allow others to access the Snowflake database and query it, which is another advantage of this solution. It has good security, and we can easily integrate it. We can connect it with multiple source systems."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"They separate compute and storage. You can scale storage independently of the computer, or you can scale computing independently of storage. If you need to buy more computer parts you can add new virtual warehouses in Snowflake. Similarly, if you need more storage, you take more storage. It's most scalable in the database essentially; typically you don't have this scalability independence on-premises."
"Time travel is one feature that really helps us out."
"What would make Amazon Redshift better is improvising on the pricing structure. For example, Acronis provides backups in cybersecurity, yet the pricing is a bit lesser than Amazon Redshift."
"We are using third-party tools to integrate Amazon Redshift, they should create their own interface on their own for it to be easily connected on the AWS itself."
"The initial deployment was complex."
"The initial setup is a complex process, especially for someone who is not familiar with nodes and configuring terms like RPUs."
"It would be good to see Redshift as a serverless offering."
"The OLAP slide and dice features need to be improved."
"When working with third-party services requires additional integrations and configurations, which can sometimes add more cost."
"If you require a highly scalable solution, I would not recommend Amazon Redshift."
"They need to incorporate some basic OLAP capabilities in the backend or at the database level. Currently, it is purely a database. They call it purely a data warehouse for the cloud. Currently, just like any database, we have to calculate all the KPIs in the front-end tools. The same KPIs again need to be calculated in Snowflake. It would be very helpful if they can include some OLAP features. This will bring efficiency because we will be able to create the KPIs within Snowflake itself and then publish them to multiple front-end tools. We won't have to recreate the same in each project. There should be the ability to automate raised queries, which is currently not possible. There should also be something for Exception Aggregation and things like that."
"Room for improvement would be writebacks. It doesn't support extensively writing back to the database, and it doesn't support web applications effectively. Ultimately, it's a database call, so if we are building web applications using Snowflake, it isn't that effective because there is some turnaround time from the database."
"Its stability could be better."
"Its transaction application needs improvement."
"I see room for improvement when it comes to credit performance. The other thing I'd like to be improved is the warehouse facility."
"Its pricing or affordability is one of the big challenges. Pricing was the only thing that we didn't like about Snowflake. In terms of technical features, it is a complete solution."
"There are three things that came to my notice. I am not very sure whether they have already done it. The first one is very specific to the virtual data warehouse. Snowflake might want to offer industry-specific models for the data warehouse. Snowflake is a very strong product with credit. For a typical retail industry, such as the pharma industry, if it can get into the functional space as well, it will be a big shot in their arm. The second thing is related to the migration from other data warehouses to Snowflake. They can make the migration a little bit more seamless and easy. It should be compatible, well-structured, and well-governed. Many enterprises have huge impetus and urgency to move to Snowflake from their existing data warehouse, so, naturally, this is an area that is critical. The third thing is related to the capability of dealing with relational and dimensional structures. It is not that friendly with relational structures. Snowflake is more friendly with the dimensional structure or the data masks, which is characteristic of a Kimball model. It is very difficult to be savvy and friendly with both structures because these structures are different and address different kinds of needs. One is manipulation-heavy, and the other one is read-heavy or analysis-heavy. One is for heavy or frequent changes and amendments, and the other one is for frequent reads. One is flat, and the other one is distributed. There are fundamental differences between these two structures. If I were to consider Snowflake as a silver bullet, it should be equally savvy on both ends, which I don't think is the case. Maybe the product has grown and scaled up from where it was."
"In a future release we would like to have a link which would allow us to connect to an external database and create certain views in your own database. This is because it is becoming hard for us to compare the data between multiple sources."
Amazon Redshift is ranked 4th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 59 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 92 reviews. Amazon Redshift is rated 7.8, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Amazon Redshift writes "Provides one place where we can store data, and allows us to easily connect to other services with AWS". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Amazon Redshift is most compared with Teradata, AWS Lake Formation, Vertica, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and Oracle Exadata, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Apache Hadoop. See our Amazon Redshift vs. Snowflake report.
See our list of best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors and best Data Warehouse vendors.
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Although I verified it only in a specific case, I performed performance verification with Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake.
Redshift has data redistribution occurred when searching under various conditions and performance was not good, but Snowflake holds data in small units called micro partitions, and also manages data for each column Therefore, operation like data redistribution was minimal and high performance was obtained.
Snowflake can also start multiple clusters in the same database, but has an architecture in which conflicts do not occur even when accessing the same data between clusters.
I recommend you to try it.
I am glad that you are already using it.