Snowflake and Amazon Redshift are two popular cloud-based data warehousing platforms that offer outstanding performance, scale, and business intelligence capabilities. Certainly, both platforms offer similar core functionalities, such as:

• Relational management
• Security
• Scalability
• Cost efficiency

The key differences, however, are their pricing models, deployment options, and user experience.

In this article, we’ll help you decide whether AWS Redshift or Snowflake is right for you. Let’s compare these two solutions based on their similarities, differences, and use cases. We also highlight how each platform addresses common challenges faced by businesses looking to implement a data warehouse.

AWS Redshift and Snowflake are two popular data warehouses. How do you know which one’s right for you? Let’s take a look.

Choosing the right data warehouse

First, let’s briefly look at data warehouses in general.

Data warehouses (DWH) are large repositories of data, collected from different data sources, which organizational typically use for analytical insights and business intelligence. An efficient data warehouse relies on an architecture that offers consistency by collecting data from different operational databases, then applying a uniform format for easier analysis and quicker insights.

One of the fundamental purposes of data warehouses is to enable quick access to historical data and context, thereby helping decision-makers to optimize strategies and improve bottom lines.

Implementing the right data warehousing solution is key to gaining a competitive advantage in today’s data-centric business world. Leveraging an efficiently provisioned business intelligence framework, a data warehouse supports business outcomes such as:

• Increased bottom line
• Efficient decision making
• Enhanced customer service
• Improved analytics

The most important characteristics of any efficiently designed data warehouse is to ensure that it:

• Has consistent schemas across different tables that returns expected results against a query.
• Supports multi-table querying out of the box, which allows users to generate ad hoc reports without writing custom code or creating custom table views.

Some key factors to consider when selecting a warehousing platform include:

• Business goals
• Cost models
• Simplicity of integration
• Cloud-readiness
• Adherence to security and compliance standards

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a cloud-based, software as a service (SaaS) data platform that allows

• Secure data sharing
• Unlimited scaling
• A seamless multi-cloud experience

The platform relies on a virtual warehouse framework that leverages third party cloud-compute resources such as AWS, Azure, or GCP. The option to choose high-performance cloud platforms allows real-time auto-scaling to organizations who are looking to:

• Run faster workloads
• Process large query volumes on the elastic cloud

As compared to legacy DWH solutions, Snowflake offers a non-traditional approach to data warehousing by abstracting compute from storage. That means data can reside in a central repository while compute instances are sized, scaled, and managed independently.

Snowflake manages all aspects of data administration for a simpler, more flexible warehousing solution that provides various capabilities of enterprise offerings.

The Snowflake analytics platform leverages a custom SQL query engine and three-layer architecture to support real time analytics of streaming big data. Its flexible architecture allows users to build their own analytical applications without having to learn new programming languages.

(Check out our Snowflake Guide.)

Benefits of Snowflake

• Organizations don’t need to install, configure, or manage the underlying warehouse platform, including hardware or software
• Integrates with most components of the data ecosystem
• Separates configuration, management and charges for storage and compute instances
• Offers an intuitive, powerful SQL interface
• Enables account-to-account data sharing
• Simple to set up and use

When to use Snowflake

Snowflake is considered the perfect data warehouse solution for situations when…

• The query load is expected to be lighter.
• Workload requires frequent scaling.
• Your organization requires an automated, managed solution with zero operational overhead to manage the underlying platform.

Now let’s turn to Redshift.