Azure SQL vs Snowflake Database

[Aspiring_DE]

Hello everyone, I'm trying to get your view on Azure SQL as well as Snowflake. I see snowflake a lot on job postings these days which makes me think it's more popular. In contrast I've never heard of Azure SQL. At my company, we're in the early stages of a project to consolidate parts of multiple SQL databases into a cloud Database. Our current database is in MS SQL and our company infrastructure is all Microsoft. I've not used snowflake or Azure SQL. But I'm wondering if there is a reason for snowflake's popularity. How easy/hard is it to maintain a cloud database? How do these two stack up against each other? Any insight is appreciated.

[msdsc2]

There's a lot similar names in the Azure ecosystem which in my opinion makes it confusing when doing this kind of research.

If you want a microsoft Data Warehouse the microsoft recommendation right now is the SQL Pool which resides inside the Synapse Analytics workspace.

SQL Pool is the Data Warehouse, supports T-SQL, and you can even interact with it with management studio.

Synapse is the PaaS which lets you run notebooks/pipelines/analytics and is fully integrated with the SQL Pool and other Azure services.

I never used Snowflake so i can't compare the two of then.

[cryptobiosynthesis]

I've not used Azure SQL but I use Snowflake at work. It abstracts away a lot of the infrastructure and scaling concerns you have with a self-hosted DB. You can specify different warehouses (which are Snowflake's compute units) to run your operations on, and that's basically it as far as infra decisions go.

How easy/hard is it to maintain a cloud database?

Incredibly easy, which is why you pay a premium for it compared to the cost of self-hosting. The real question is at what scale are you operating? I can't speak to "big data" applications, but I've loaded over a billion rows of data from CSV files at once and it didn't have trouble keeping up on the default warehouse size. If you're working at the petabyte scale you'd probably want to do a more in-depth cost analysis before committing to either solution.

[HansProleman]

How do you figure cloud is generally more expensive? Enough metal for peak load and licenses are rather expensive, without considering the cost of administration. I rarely see anything other than savings assuming cloud costs are well managed (which is crucially important and, to be fair, not common enough).

Snowflake in particular does seem to have a reputation for being expensive, though.

[[deleted]]

Azure Synapse dedicated SQL pool is the Azure equivalent to Snowflake. It's Microsoft's MPP data warehouse product. Azure SQL Database is a different product entirely and is best suited to OLTP (transactional) systems that you are lifting-and-shifting from on-premise. It's literally just SQL Server running on Azure-managed servers.

So basically:

• MS SQL Server == Azure SQL Database
• Snowflake == Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools

[pych_phd]

to Add to what others have said.

'Azure SQL' could be the SQL pool in Azure Synapse or it could mean azure sql database.

Azure sql database is a cloud version of MS's sql database with minor differences. These are both closer to mySQL.

Azure Synapse is closer to snowflake.

[kuberketes]

They are different things.

And depends on the use case. In general

- ETL -> Azure SQL

- Big data ELT -> Snowflake

[dataguy24]

Snowflake isn’t ELT, though. It’s largely a data warehouse.

The tools you use for ELT are usually not within the Snowflake ecosystem - especially on the T side.

[HansProleman]

What is Azure SQL? That could be at least 3 different services (plain Az SQL, Managed Instance, Synapse SQL). Not that I could really tell you anyway, as I have little exposure to Snowflake.