EngineRoom vs Snowflake: Which is a better fit?

Speaker 1: Hi, I'm David, Head of Engineering. I give Snowflake a five out of five, and for more reviews like this, click below. Before using Snowflake, we were using a combination of different clouds and different databases. So we had data in SQL Server in Redshift and MySQL across AWS, across Azure on premises. So we were looking for a solution that allowed us to aggregate all of our company data and product data in one place that was accessible to all of our people all the time. We chose Snowflake because we felt it had a great range of features. So in particular, the ability to push security right down to the database level, via role level security, via data masking, but also as well the ability to run different workloads at different combinations of CPU, RAM, and memory without having to size everything up to the maximum possible that we might need. So we thought Snowflake had a lot of versatility and a lot of great features built in. Getting Snowflake into our business was straightforward. The Snowflake team absolutely helped us. We had an account team who worked with us and gave us knowledge and training, but even say there were some learnings, we had some difficulty initially working out how we could migrate data, particularly not just an initial load, but ongoing changes into Snowflake from various sources. Also as well, Snowflake, one thing you really have to be across it is how it's priced and how it's costed because it does charge you on consumption based on the type of workloads you're running. So there was some effort on our part to work that out, to tune that, to try to make sure we are controlling costs. My advice for somebody thinking about getting Snowflake or getting started with Snowflake is to think carefully about the type of application you want to use Snowflake for, because your costs will absolutely be directly related to how you use Snowflake. Also my other recommendation is to think about your security carefully, because Snowflake offers a lot of features out of the box to allow you to push security down to the database level through role-based access, role level security, data masking, and a range of other things like secure sharing. So design your security model carefully because you really have the opportunity to enforce it directly at the database level. So they are my two recommendations if you are thinking of using Snowflake.