We performed a comparison between Amazon EMR 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."The project management is very streamlined."
"One of the valuable features about this solution is that it's managed services, so it's pretty stable, and scalable as much as you wish. It has all the necessary distributions. With some additional work, it's also possible to change to a Spark version with the latest version of EMR. It also has Hudi, so we are leveraging Apache Hudi on EMR for change data capture, so then it comes out-of-the-box in EMR."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"It has a variety of options and support systems."
"In Amazon EMR it is easy to rebuild anything, easy to upgrade and has good fault tolerance."
"The solution is pretty simple to set up."
"Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data."
"The ability to resize the cluster is what really makes it stand out over other Hadoop and big data solutions."
"Working with Parquet files is support out of the box and it makes large dataset processing much easier."
"The most valuable feature has been the Snowflake data sharing and dynamic data masking."
"It was relatively easy to use, and it was easy for people to convert to it."
"I have found the solution's most valuable features to be storage, flexibility, ease of use, and security."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"The overall ecosystem was easy to manage. Given that we weren't a very highly technical group, it was preferable to other things we looked at because it could do all of the cloud tunings. It can tune your data warehouse to an appropriate size for controlled billing, resume and sleep functions, and all such things. It was much more simple than doing native Azure or AWS development. It was stable, and their support was also perfect. It was also very easy to deploy. It was one of those rare times where they did exactly what they said they could do."
"Snowflake has three great features: Snowpiping is proving to be very valuable, Time Travel is excellent, and Snowpipes are another great functionality the solution has made available."
"The cloning functionality has been the most valuable. I have been able to completely copy databases. The data sharing concept is also useful. As compared to, for example, SAP, Snowflake is a lot more open, and it allows a lot more connectivity for other providers than an SAP ecosystem."
"The problem for us is it starts very slow."
"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."
"There were times where they would release new versions and it seemed to end up breaking old versions, which is very strange."
"The dashboard management could be better. Right now, it's lacking a bit."
"Amazon EMR can improve by adding some features, such as megastore services and HiveServer2. Additionally, the user interface could be better, similar to what Apache service provides, cross-platform services."
"The most complicated thing is configuring to the cluster and ensure it's running correctly."
"The legacy versions of the solution are not supported in the new versions."
"We don't have much control. If we have multiple users, if they want to scale up, the cost will go and increase and we don't know how we can restrict that price part."
"There could be better ELT tools that are appropriate for Snowflake. We decided on Matillion and it seemed to be the only one. There need to be better choices, it would be great if Snowflake provided an ELT solution that people could use. Additionally, if there was a pure cloud-based ELT tool it would be useful."
"Snowflake has support for stored procedures, but it is not that powerful."
"The pricing of the solution should be much easier to calculate or find by yourself."
"There is room for improvement in Snowflake's integration with Python. We do a lot of SQL programming in Snowflake, but we go to a different tool to program when we have to in Python."
"We are yet to figure out how to integrate tools, such as Liquibase, to release changes to our data warehouse model."
"It would be helpful if Snowflake could create good reports instead of using Power BI reports."
"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 transaction application needs improvement."
Amazon EMR is ranked 8th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 20 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 94 reviews. Amazon EMR is rated 7.8, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Amazon EMR writes "Provides efficient data processing features and has good scalability ". 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 EMR is most compared with Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop, Azure Data Factory, Amazon Redshift, Apache Spark and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and SAP BW4HANA. See our Amazon EMR vs. Snowflake report.
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