Profiles / Snowflake
Snowflake
The default cloud data warehouse for many companies, with excellent data sharing and governance. On ClickBench, though, its Medium Gen2 warehouse needs 60 s of hot runtime for a query set ClickHouse Cloud finishes in 11 s, and larger warehouse sizes barely move that number.
Strong warehouse, slow for interactive analyticsProprietary
Strengths
- +Mature governance, security and data-sharing features.
- +Separation of storage and compute with simple warehouse sizing.
- +Fast bulk load in ClickBench (67 s).
Weaknesses
- −Worst hot-run score of the managed group: 5.66.
- −Bigger warehouses barely help: Medium, Large and X-Large all take about 60 s for the full query set.
- −Credits are billed per second with a 60-second minimum each time a warehouse resumes.
- −Closed source and cloud-only.
Capabilities
| Real-time ingestion | Snowpipe / Snowpipe Streaming |
|---|---|
| Columnar storage | Micro-partitions |
| Open source | Proprietary |
| Managed cloud | AWS, GCP and Azure |
| Query speed at scale | 5.66 managed |
| High concurrency | Not tested; scales out with multi-cluster warehouses |
| Cost model | Credits per warehouse-second, 60 s minimum |
Snowflake vs ClickHouse
Against ClickHouse Cloud, Snowflake scores 5.66 on hot runs to ClickHouse’s 1.06, and stores the data in 13.0 GB to ClickHouse’s 10.3 GB. For company-wide BI, ELT pipelines and data sharing where queries run in seconds, not milliseconds, Snowflake is a reasonable choice; for real-time analytics, we recommend ClickHouse.