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Amazon RDS vs Snowflake: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Amazon RDS and Snowflake. Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is a managed database service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Snowflake, on the other hand, is a cloud-based data warehouse solution that provides a powerful and flexible platform for data analytics.
Database types: While Amazon RDS supports various relational database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server, Snowflake is specifically designed for data warehousing and does not support other database types. Snowflake's architecture is optimized for handling large-scale data analytics workloads.
Scalability: Amazon RDS allows you to scale your database vertically by increasing the instance size or horizontally by adding read replicas. However, Snowflake offers automatic and elastic scalability without the need for manual intervention. Snowflake automatically scales storage and compute resources based on your workload needs.
Pricing: Amazon RDS follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where you pay for the resources you consume. The pricing is based on the database engine, instance type, and storage size. On the other hand, Snowflake follows a usage-based pricing model, where you are billed based on the amount of data stored and the amount of compute resources used for query processing.
Data sharing: Snowflake provides built-in functionality for secure data sharing across different organizations, allowing you to easily share data sets with external parties without the need for data movement. Amazon RDS does not have native data sharing capabilities and requires manual data export and import for sharing data.
Concurrency: Snowflake is designed to support a high level of concurrency, allowing multiple users to query and analyze data concurrently without performance degradation. Amazon RDS also supports concurrency, but the performance may be impacted as the number of concurrent connections increases.
Data processing capabilities: Snowflake provides advanced data processing capabilities, such as support for semi-structured data (JSON, Avro, XML), data masking, data encryption, and automated data optimization. Amazon RDS offers more traditional database functionalities without these advanced features.
In summary, the key differences between Amazon RDS and Snowflake lie in the database types supported, scalability options, pricing models, data sharing capabilities, concurrency support, and data processing capabilities.
Pros of Amazon RDS
- Reliable failovers165
- Automated backups156
- Backed by amazon130
- Db snapshots92
- Multi-availability87
- Control iops, fast restore to point of time30
- Security28
- Elastic24
- Push-button scaling20
- Automatic software patching20
- Replication4
- Reliable3
- Isolation2
Pros of Snowflake
- Public and Private Data Sharing7
- Multicloud4
- Good Performance4
- User Friendly4
- Great Documentation3
- Serverless2
- Economical1
- Usage based billing1
- Innovative1