Data has become the lifeblood of business, and data warehouses play an important role in this. However, determining which data warehouse is best for your company can be difficult.
Today, we continue our discussion of modern data warehouses by comparing Redshift and Snowflake and outlining key factors to consider when selecting a data warehouse.
Snowflake Vs Redshift: The basics
To begin distinguishing the two, Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse service. One of the cool things about this system is that you can start with a few hundred gigabytes of data and scale up to a petabyte or more as your needs grow.
Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is a cloud-based data storage and analytics service offered by Snowflake Computing. Corporate users can store and analyze data using cloud-based hardware and software with this solution. The data is then stored in Amazon S3. Rather than relying on technologies such as Hadoop, Snowflake makes use of the public cloud ecosystem.
What is Amazon Redshift?
Amazon Redshift is a cloud-based data warehouse service provided by Amazon Web Services. Using standard SQL, you can query and combine exabytes of structured and semi-structured data across your data warehouse, operational database, and data lake.
Because the product is deeply integrated with the AWS platform, you can easily save the results of your queries back to your S3 data lake using open formats, for example.
What is Snowflake?
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse that provides flexible and scalable storage as a service. While Snowflake is a stand-alone service, it can be used in conjunction with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. It can also connect to and use some Amazon Web Services services.
To ingest data, for example, you could connect Snowflake to S3 in AWS. Your data may begin in AWS S3 buckets, but you can bring it into Snowflake to run queries. Snowflake, on the other hand, is an independent company that provides competitive, enterprise-level data warehouse services.
Major Differences Between Snowflake and Redshift
Here’s a quick overview of how these two cloud data warehouse solutions differ:
- Snowflake Information Warehouse
- Payment for computing and storage separately
- Packages based on tiers
- Features for automated database maintenance
- Each tier has its own set of security and compliance options.
- JSON-based functions are supported.
Redshift Data Warehouse has a unique architecture that is designed to scale on the web.
- More consistent offer package
- Engine for machine learning
- More hands-on maintenance is required.
- Long-term commitments are eligible for significant discounts.
- Security and compliance are strictly enforced for all users.
Final Verdict
The decision between Snowflake and Redshift will be influenced by your budget and business requirements. For example, if your company is in charge of managing large workloads ranging from millions to billions of dollars, Redshift is the clear winner, whereas Snowflake is a modern data warehousing solution designed specifically for today’s data teams, and it outperforms Amazon Redshift on almost every front and for the majority of businesses.
Both Redshift and Snowflake are SQL-based solutions, they operate similarly, but Redshift is significantly older and more difficult to use. They also share several features related to data sharing and data recovery. However, the solutions themselves are quite different. Snowflake was designed to work right out of the box and require no maintenance. It handles workloads that require frequent scaling extremely well. Users simply have to load their data into Snowflake and they can immediately start querying it for analysis.
Redshift is a much older tool; due to this it carries some baggage from before the cloud was so popular. Redshift simply cannot provide the same value that Snowflake does in the same timeframe. Users must first install infrastructure and hardware before they can use Redshift.
Redshift has a significant advantage over Snowflake in that it integrates natively with the rest of the AWS ecosystem. Snowflake has many integrations with other AWS services, but they are not all equal.
Snowflake is a modern data warehouse, but it can quickly become expensive. This is another area where Redshift has a significant advantage, as it is generally less expensive in the long run. Finally, some workloads are handled exceptionally well by Snowflake, while others are handled more efficiently by Redshift. In any case, when evaluating cloud data warehouse solutions, the business demands, use cases, and resources should always be kept in mind.
