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Snowflake VS Apache Druid

Compare Snowflake VS Apache Druid and see what are their differences

Snowflake logo Snowflake

Snowflake is the only data platform built for the cloud for all your data & all your users. Learn more about our purpose-built SQL cloud data warehouse.

Apache Druid logo Apache Druid

Fast column-oriented distributed data store
  • Snowflake Homepage
    Homepage //
    2024-07-19
  • Apache Druid Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-07

Snowflake features and specs

  • Scalability
    Snowflake offers virtually unlimited scalability. It separates compute and storage, so both can scale independently according to the needs of the workload.
  • Performance
    Snowflake's architecture is optimized for performance, offering automatic clustering and parallel processing which enable faster query execution.
  • Ease of Use
    The platform provides a user-friendly interface and automates many maintenance tasks, such as indexing and partitioning, making it easier for both data engineers and analysts to use.
  • Data Sharing
    Snowflake enables seamless data sharing among different accounts without the need to duplicate data, improving collaboration and data management.
  • Security
    Snowflake includes comprehensive security features such as end-to-end encryption, role-based access control, and VPC/VPN network policies.
  • Multi-Cloud Support
    Snowflake supports multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, giving organizations flexibility in choosing their infrastructure.

Possible disadvantages of Snowflake

  • Cost
    While powerful, Snowflake can become expensive, especially if not managed properly, due to its pay-as-you-go pricing model.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Once an organization is deeply integrated with Snowflake, switching to another solution can be complex and costly, contributing to vendor lock-in.
  • Learning Curve
    Though easier than many traditional databases, there is still a learning curve associated with mastering Snowflake’s unique architecture and features.
  • Third-Party Ecosystem
    While Snowflake integrates well with many third-party tools, it may not support all the tools and services you are currently using, requiring additional effort for integration.
  • Network Performance
    Snowflake's performance can be impacted by network latency, especially if large datasets are being transferred over the internet between Snowflake and on-premises systems.

Apache Druid features and specs

  • Real-Time Data Ingestion
    Apache Druid supports real-time data ingestion, which allows users to immediately query and analyze freshly ingested data, making it ideal for applications that require up-to-the-minute insights.
  • High Performance
    Druid is designed to provide fast query performance, especially for OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) queries. Its architecture leverages techniques like indexing, compression, and shard-based parallel processing to deliver quick results, even on large data sets.
  • Scalability
    Druid's architecture allows it to scale horizontally, supporting both large amounts of data and numerous concurrent queries. This makes it suitable for systems that need to handle high scalability requirements.
  • Flexible Data Exploration
    It supports complex queries, including group-bys, filters, and aggregations, which are essential for exploratory data analysis. Users can perform a wide range of data slicing and dicing operations.
  • Rich Multi-Tenancy Support
    Druid supports multi-tenancy, enabling different user groups to access and query the database simultaneously without performance degradation, thus accommodating diverse data analytics requirements within the same system.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Druid

  • Complex Setup and Configuration
    Setting up and configuring Apache Druid can be complex and resource-intensive. It requires a good understanding of its architecture and components, which may pose a steep learning curve for beginners.
  • Resource Heavy
    Druid can be resource-intensive, often requiring significant CPU, memory, and disk resources, especially when handling large scale data and high query loads. This can result in increased infrastructure costs.
  • Limited Transactional Support
    Druid is not designed for transactional workloads and lacks full ACID compliance. It is optimized for read-heavy analytical queries rather than write-heavy transactional operations.
  • Complexity in Handling Updates
    Updating or deleting existing records in Druid is not straightforward and often involves re-indexing data. This can complicate use cases where mutable data is a common requirement.
  • Limited Tooling and Ecosystem
    Compared to more established databases and analytical engines, Druid's ecosystem and available tooling for development, monitoring, and management might be less extensive, potentially requiring custom solutions.

Analysis of Snowflake

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Snowflake is considered a good solution for businesses looking for a modern data warehousing solution that is easy to use, requires minimal infrastructure management, and provides strong performance for big data analytics.

Why this product is good

  • Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform known for its scalability, flexibility, and speed. It offers a unique architecture that separates storage and computing, allowing for on-demand scaling and efficient data management. Its support for structured and semi-structured data, along with a wide range of integrations and robust security features, makes it a popular choice for many organizations.

Recommended for

  • Organizations with large and diverse datasets that require scalable storage and computing solutions.
  • Data-driven companies looking for a platform that supports real-time analytics and machine learning workloads.
  • Businesses seeking a cost-effective solution with pay-as-you-go pricing and minimal infrastructure overhead.
  • Enterprises needing to integrate data from various sources, including cloud services, IoT devices, and relational databases.

Snowflake videos

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Apache Druid videos

An introduction to Apache Druid

More videos:

  • Review - Building a Real-Time Analytics Stack with Apache Kafka and Apache Druid

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Snowflake and Apache Druid)
Big Data
69 69%
31% 31
Databases
0 0%
100% 100
Data Warehousing
100 100%
0% 0
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Snowflake and Apache Druid

Snowflake Reviews

Top 6 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Snowflake accommodates data analysts of all levels since it does not use Python or R programming language. It is also well known for its secure and compressed storage for semi-structured data. Besides this, it allows you to spin multiple virtual warehouses based on your needs while parallelizing and isolating individual queries boosting their performance. You can interact...
Source: geekflare.com
Top 5 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Snowflake is one of the most popular data warehousing solutions on the market and delivers an incredible experience across multiple public clouds. By using Snowflake, companies can pull data from various business intelligence tools to do reporting and analytics without any database administration, thus avoiding high overhead costs. Unlike other data warehousing services,...
Top 5 BigQuery Alternatives: A Challenge of Complexity
Plus, Snowflake doesn’t include data integrations, so teams will have to bolt on an ETL tool to pipe their data into the warehouse. Those third-party pipelines add extra cost and overhead in the form of setup and maintenance that some teams may not want to absorb.
Source: blog.panoply.io
Top Big Data Tools For 2021
This platform can be used for data warehousing, data science, data engineering, sharing, and application development. It enables you to easily secure your data and execute various analytic workloads. Snowflake also ensures a seamless experience when working with multiple public clouds.

Apache Druid Reviews

Rockset, ClickHouse, Apache Druid, or Apache Pinot? Which is the best database for customer-facing analytics?
“When you're dealing with highly concurrent environments, you really need an architecture that’s designed for that CPU efficiency to get the most performance out of the smallest hardware footprint—which is another reason why folks like to use Apache Druid,” says David Wang, VP of Product and Corporate Marketing at Imply. (Imply offers Druid as a service.)
Source: embeddable.com
Apache Druid vs. Time-Series Databases
Druid is a real-time analytics database that not only incorporates architecture designs from TSDBs such as time-based partitioning and fast aggregation, but also includes ideas from search systems and data warehouses, making it a great fit for all types of event-driven data. Druid is fundamentally an OLAP engine at heart, albeit one designed for more modern, event-driven...
Source: imply.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Druid should be more popular than Snowflake. It has been mentiond 10 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Snowflake mentions (4)

  • DeWitt Clause, or Can You Benchmark %DATABASE% and Get Away With It
    Snowflake, a data warehousing company founded by ex-Oracle and ex-VectorWise experts, responded with a blog post that critically reviewed Databricks' findings, reported different results for the same benchmark, and claimed comparable price/performance to Databricks. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • Personal Support at Internet Scale
    Snowflake: Snowflake is fast, and works well as a product analytics database. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • Less than 1TB of data what tools should I get better at?
    If you just go to snowflake.com you can sign up for a demo account for free for a month and I'm fairly certain you can get more than one of these accounts (I would recycle emails doing it all the time.) Once you have an account there's lots of docs and videos out there either using the Database via their UI or via python using their connector. They also have a pyspark connector but you might want to just learn... Source: over 3 years ago
  • *BOMATO*
    Early stage funding & VCs clearly demarcate between tech companies and tech enabled companies. But, once the PE comes into the picture at the scale of BlackStone, the border between doordash.com and snowflake.com starts to blur. The motivation is to make some bucks by going to IPO and they know how to get it done. Source: almost 4 years ago

Apache Druid mentions (10)

  • Why You Shouldn’t Invest In Vector Databases?
    Regarding the storage aspect of vector databases, it is noteworthy that indexing techniques take precedence over the choice of underlying storage. In fact, many databases have the capability to incorporate indexing modules directly, enabling efficient vector search. Existing OLAP databases that are designed for real-time analytics and utilizing columnar storage, such as ClickHouse, Apache Pinot, and Apache Druid,... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How to choose the right type of database
    Apache Druid: Focused on real-time analytics and interactive queries on large datasets. Druid is well-suited for high-performance applications in user-facing analytics, network monitoring, and business intelligence. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Choosing Between a Streaming Database and a Stream Processing Framework in Python
    Online analytical processing (OLAP) databases like Apache Druid, Apache Pinot, and ClickHouse shine in addressing user-initiated analytical queries. You might write a query to analyze historical data to find the most-clicked products over the past month efficiently using OLAP databases. When contrasting with streaming databases, they may not be optimized for incremental computation, leading to challenges in... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Analysing Github Stars - Extracting and analyzing data from Github using Apache NiFi®, Apache Kafka® and Apache Druid®
    Spencer Kimball (now CEO at CockroachDB) wrote an interesting article on this topic in 2021 where they created spencerkimball/stargazers based on a Python script. So I started thinking: could I create a data pipeline using Nifi and Kafka (two OSS tools often used with Druid) to get the API data into Druid - and then use SQL to do the analytics? The answer was yes! And I have documented the outcome below. Here’s... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Apache Druid® - an enterprise architect's overview
    Apache Druid is part of the modern data architecture. It uses a special data format designed for analytical workloads, using extreme parallelisation to get data in and get data out. A shared-nothing, microservices architecture helps you to build highly-available, extreme scale analytics features into your applications. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Snowflake and Apache Druid, you can also consider the following products

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

Apache Spark - Apache Spark is an engine for big data processing, with built-in modules for streaming, SQL, machine learning and graph processing.

Databricks - Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering and business.‎What is Apache Spark?

Apache Flink - Flink is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations.

Qubole - Qubole delivers a self-service platform for big aata analytics built on Amazon, Microsoft and Google Clouds.

Splunk - Splunk's operational intelligence platform helps unearth intelligent insights from machine data.