Do You know, out of so many ETL tools available in the market, which one suits best for your business? If you are already a Snowflake customer, are you having trouble setting up and maintaining a reliable Snowflake ETL tool for data loading? This article lists down some of the popular ETL platforms which will seamlessly load data into the Snowflake data warehouse.
Introduction to Snowflake
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse created by three data warehousing experts at Oracle Corporation in 2012. Snowflake Computing, the vendor behind the Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse product, raised over $400 million over the past eight years and acquired thousands of customers. One might wonder if another data warehouse vendor is needed in an already crowded field of traditional data warehousing technologies like Oracle, Teradata, SQL Server, and cloud data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Google Big Query. Well, the answer is the disruption caused by cloud technologies and cloud opportunities for new technology companies. Public clouds enabled start-ups to shed past baggage, learn from the past, challenge the status quo, and take a fresh look at cloud opportunities to create a new data warehouse product. Read Snowflake’s pros and Cons to understand the modern, cloud-built data warehouse for consumers of cloud technologies.
You can register for a $400 free trial of Snowflake within minutes. This credit is sufficient to store a terabyte of data and run a small data warehouse environment for a few days.
What is Snowflake ETL
ETL (Extract Transform Load) is the process of data extraction from various sources, transformation into compatible formats, and loading into a destination. Snowflake ETL, similarly refers to the extraction of relevant data from data sources, transforming and then loading it into Snowflake.
Modern businesses prefer ELT tools over the traditional ETL system. With the ELT approach, necessary transformations are made after it is loaded into the data warehouse.
Why ETL your Data into Snowflake
If you are already storing your valuable data in some other database, here are some of the unique features of Snowflake:
- Decoupled architecture: Decoupled layers of storage, compute, and cloud services in Snowflake architecture allow independent scaling.
- JSON using SQL: Snowflake supports JSON data using a set of functions like a variant, parse_json.
- Fast Clone: Fast Clone is a feature that enables you to clone a table or an entire database, instantly with no additional service cost.
- Encryption: Snowflake supports various encryption mechanisms like end-to-end encryption, and client-side encryption, guaranteeing a high level of data security.
- Query optimization: Query optimization engines automatically run in the background to improve the query performances and take care of processes such as indexing or partitioning.
How to Evaluate Snowflake ETL Tools
Every organization needs to invest in the right ETL tool for its business operations. We have listed some major factors to be considered before choosing an ETL service:
- Ease of use: Check, whether you can use the tool effortlessly. It can be a simple drag and drop GUIs or writing SQL or Python scripts to enable complex transformations in the ETL process.
- Supports multiple data sources: The ETL service provider should support various data sources for analytics.
- Extensibility: Most ETL tools support a fixed set of data sources, but there should also be an option for custom additions of new data sources.
- Data Transformation: Check the level of data transformation supported by the ETL tool.
- Pricing: Cost is always a concern and the price depends on a range of factors and uses cases.
- Product Documentation: Detailed documentation for in-house engineers is always helpful.
- Customer support: Timely, efficient, and multi-channel customer support is very essential for troubleshooting an ETL tool.
5 Best Snowflake ETL Tools
The following ETL tools are popular for catering data needs of modern businesses especially the ones that use the Snowflake data warehouse.
Daton
Daton is an effective data integration tool that would seamlessly extract all the relevant Data from popular data sources and then consolidate and store it in the data warehouse of your choice for more effective analysis. The best part is that you can use Daton without any coding experience and it is the cheapest data pipeline available in the market.
Daton Features:
- IP Address Extraction
- Load Scheduling
- CSV and Excel export with data manipulation
- Data Warehousing
- Heterogeneous platform support
- Knowledge modules for developers
- High Volume Processing
Daton Limitations
- Daton focuses only on the extraction and loading process as ELT systems are becoming more popular.
- Data transformation has to be taken care of by the analysts after it is loaded in the data warehouse. They will be able to customize according to the use-cases.
Daton Pricing:
There is a wide range of plans. STARTER at $150, GROWTH at $500, BUSINESS at $1000. The ENTERPRISE plan is for all the customs requirements and the LITE plan is Pay per Use.
Stitch Data
Stitch provides a powerful ETL tool designed for developers. Stitch connects to all data sources and SaaS tools to replicate all relevant data to a data warehouse.
Stitch Data Features:
- Advanced scheduling
- Post-load webhooks
- Notification extensibility
- API key management.
Stitch Data Limitations
- It is difficult to replicate data from a single source to multiple destinations.
- The data source library is limited.
Stitch Data Pricing:
There is a 14-day trial period. The three plans available are the Free plan, the Standard plan at $100 per month, and the Enterprise plan for custom requirements.
Blendo
Blendo is a good option for businesses that want to access and model company data. It provides a simple ETL service that runs data loads from different data sources easily.
Blendo features
- Blendo is easy to set up, and no coding is required.
- It supports over 45 data sources, including SaaS platforms, cloud storage, and databases.
- Data monitoring and notification features are available for data pipeline breakdowns.
- Customer support includes Intercom online chat and email.
- Product documentation is available on the website.
Blendo Limitations
- The product focuses mainly on the extraction and loading process not much on data transformations.
- Users cannot add a new data source or edit an existing one without help from experts.
Blendo Pricing
Blendo offers a 14-day fully-featured free trial. The basic plan starts at $150 per month.
Hevo Data
Hevo Data offers a robust and comprehensive data integration solution. It is also quick to set up and has an intuitive interface to customize your ETL process.
Hevo Data features
- Hevo claims to be a zero-maintenance data pipeline.
- It offers a powerful plug-and-play data transformation.
- Hevo supports real-time and reliable data replication with no data loss.
- The fault-tolerant architecture resolves data disruptions along with the operational status of real-time loads.
- It supports 100+ data sources like SaaS platforms, cloud storage, databases, BI tools.
- It offers unparalleled customer support through online Intercom chat, email, and over the phone.
- Extensive documentation, including video resources on the product, is given on the company website.
Hevo Data Limitations
- Alerting needs to be improved.
- The data transformation interface should be user-friendly.
- Scheduling a pipeline job is difficult.
Hevo Data Pricing
It comes with a 14-day free trial. The basic plan starts at $149 per month.
Apache Airflow
Apache Airflow is the most popular open-source product for businesses looking to develop a custom Snowflake ETL tool in-house.
Apache Airflow features
- Apache Airflow is an open-source product free to download and use.
- It enables to build of data workflows as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs).
- Detailed online documentation is available for setup and troubleshooting.
- Customer Support is provided through an Airflow Slack community.
- Users can add functionality to Apache workflows using Python.
- ETL your data into any system through custom code, or a pre-built module/plugin.
Apache Airflow Limitations
This tool involves a lot of scripting and Python code for setup and operations.
Apache Airflow Pricing
Open-source, licensed under Apache License Version 2.0.
Conclusion
There are several Snowflake ETL tools available in the market. Modern businesses are more comfortable outsourcing their data needs to these ETL service providers. So that they can dedicate more time and resources to effective analytics and business intelligence. Daton is a no-code Data Pipeline that takes care of all the business data for organizations using the Snowflake data warehouse.
