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Snowflake VS Kafka Streams

Compare Snowflake VS Kafka Streams 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.

Kafka Streams logo Kafka Streams

Apache Kafka: A Distributed Streaming Platform.
  • Snowflake Homepage
    Homepage //
    2024-07-19
  • Kafka Streams Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-21

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.

Kafka Streams features and specs

  • Scalability
    Kafka Streams is designed to scale horizontally, allowing you to handle large volumes of data by distributing processing across multiple nodes.
  • Integration with Kafka
    Kafka Streams is part of the Apache Kafka ecosystem, providing seamless integration with Kafka topics for both input and output, simplifying data pipeline creation.
  • Exactly-once semantics
    Kafka Streams offers exactly-once processing semantics, which ensures data consistency and accuracy in scenarios where data duplication or loss is unacceptable.
  • Microservices Architecture
    It supports microservices architecture by allowing developers to build lightweight stream processing applications that are easy to deploy and manage.
  • Stateful and Stateless Processing
    Supports both stateful (requiring state storage and access) and stateless processing, providing flexibility in stream processing capabilities.
  • Fault Tolerant
    Kafka Streams is designed to be fault-tolerant, automatically recovering from failures and resuming processing without data loss.

Possible disadvantages of Kafka Streams

  • Complexity
    Setting up and configuring Kafka Streams can be complex, requiring a good understanding of Apache Kafka, stream processing principles, and application logic.
  • Resource Intensive
    Kafka Streams can be resource-intensive, demanding sufficient CPU and memory resources, especially when dealing with high-volume data streams.
  • Java Specific
    Primarily designed for Java applications, which may limit its ease of use for teams or projects that are based in other programming languages.
  • Limited UI Tools
    Lacks advanced UI tools for monitoring and managing stream applications, which can make it challenging for users to oversee and troubleshoot applications.
  • Slow Start-up Time
    Kafka Streams applications can have relatively slow start-up times, which might impact scenarios requiring quick deployment and scaling.

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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Kafka Streams videos

Spark Streaming Vs Kafka Streams || Which is The Best for Stream Processing?

More videos:

  • Review - Big Data Analytics in Near-Real-Time with Apache Kafka Streams - Allen Underwood
  • Review - Spring Tips: Spring Cloud Stream Kafka Streams

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Snowflake and Kafka Streams)
Big Data
75 75%
25% 25
Stream Processing
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 Kafka Streams

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.

Kafka Streams Reviews

We have no reviews of Kafka Streams yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Kafka Streams should be more popular than Snowflake. It has been mentiond 14 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

Kafka Streams mentions (14)

  • Top 10 Common Data Engineers and Scientists Pain Points in 2024
    Data scientists often prefer Python for its simplicity and powerful libraries like Pandas or SciPy. However, many real-time data processing tools are Java-based. Take the example of Kafka, Flink, or Spark streaming. While these tools have their Python API/wrapper libraries, they introduce increased latency, and data scientists need to manage dependencies for both Python and JVM environments. For example,... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Forward Compatible Enum Values in API with Java Jackson
    We’re not discussing the technical details behind the deduplication process. It could be Apache Flink, Apache Spark, or Kafka Streams. Anyway, it’s out of the scope of this article. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Kafka Internals - Learn kafka in-depth (Part-1)
    In pub-sub systems, you cannot have multiple services to consume the same data because the messages are deleted after being consumed by one consumer. Whereas in Kafka, you can have multiple services to consume. This opens the door to a lot of opportunities such as Kafka streams, Kafka connect. We’ll discuss these at the end of the series. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Event streaming in .Net with Kafka
    Internally, Streamiz use the .Net client for Apache Kafka released by Confluent and try to provide the same features than Kafka Streams. There is gap between these two library, but the trend is decreasing after each release. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Apache Pulsar vs Apache Kafka - How to choose a data streaming platform
    Both Kafka and Pulsar provide some kind of stream processing capability, but Kafka is much further along in that regard. Pulsar stream processing relies on the Pulsar Functions interface which is only suited for simple callbacks. On the other hand, Kafka Streams and ksqlDB are more complete solutions that could be considered replacements for Apache Spark or Apache Flink, state-of-the-art stream-processing... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Snowflake and Kafka Streams, you can also consider the following products

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

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

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

Apache Kafka - Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.

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

Apache Storm - Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system.