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."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."
"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."
"Amazon EMR's most valuable features are processing speed and data storage capacity."
"It has a variety of options and support systems."
"The solution is scalable."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The solution is pretty simple to set up."
"Snowflake is scalable both in terms of the amount of data that you can run through it and the number of users that engage with it."
"We find the data sharing and data marketplace aspects of Snowflake absolutely amazing."
"The Mbps they have established is quite a bit faster than any other data warehouse."
"Its performance is most valuable. As compared to SQL Server, we are able to see a significant improvement in performance with Snowflake."
"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."
"As long as you don't need to worry about the storage or cost, this solution would be one of the best ones on the market for scalability purposes."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"The snapshot feature is good, the rollback feature is good and the interface is user-friendly."
"The product must add some of the latest technologies to provide more flexibility to the users."
"The problem for us is it starts very slow."
"Amazon EMR is continuously improving, but maybe something like CI/CD out-of-the-box or integration with Prometheus Grafana."
"The dashboard management could be better. Right now, it's lacking a bit."
"Modules and strategies should be better handled and notified early in advance."
"The legacy versions of the solution are not supported in the new versions."
"The most complicated thing is configuring to the cluster and ensure it's running correctly."
"There is room for improvement in pricing."
"We would like to be able to do modeling with Snowflake. It should support statistical modeling."
"Snowflake could improve if they had an Operational Data Store(ODS) space."
"They don't have any SLAs in place. It would be better if they did."
"Sometimes it can be tricky to manage multiple environments if you're purely using Snowflake as your scripting and pipeline environment."
"Portability is a big hurdle right now for our clients. Porting all of your existing SQL ecosystem, such as stored procedures, to Snowflake is a major pain point. Currently, Snowflake stored procedures use JavaScript, but they should support SQL-based stored procedures. It would be a huge advantage if you can write your stored procedures using SQL. It seems that they are working on this feature, and they are yet to release it. I remember seeing some notes saying that they were going to do that in the future, but the sooner this feature comes out, it would be better for Snowflake because there are a lot of clients with whom I'm interacting, and their main hurdle is to take their existing Oracle or SQL Server stored procedures and move them into Snowflake. For this, you need to learn JavaScript and how it works, which is not easy and becomes a little tricky. If it supports SQL-based procedures, then you can just cut-paste the SQL code, run it, and easily fix small issues."
"Snowflake could improve migration. It should be made easier. It would be beneficial if it could offer some OLTP features. One of our customers was using Oracle for both data warehousing and OLTP workloads, and they were able to migrate their data warehousing workloads to Snowflake without major issues. However, for some of their OLTP requirements, such as needing a response time of fewer than 10 milliseconds for certain queries, Snowflake is currently unable to provide that."
"It's difficult to know how to size everything correctly."
"We would like to have an on-premises deployment option that has the same features, including scalability."
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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