Why Organizations Choose InterSystems
Modern data-driven enterprises require platforms that can deliver real-time insights, support AI and GenAI initiatives, and ensure secure, governed, and consistent data access—without introducing additional data silos or forcing rigid architectural decisions.
InterSystems IRIS® and InterSystems Data Fabric Studio are purpose-built to meet these needs. They unify data across silos and power high-performance, hybrid, real-time operational-analytic workloads making data immediately actionable for decision-making and AI.
Snowflake, while a strong data warehouse platform, is designed primarily for analytics and only on data stored in the cloud. Snowflake lacks native support for basic OLTP features such as constraint enforcement, triggers, nested transaction savepoints, etc. and often requires external tools for integration, streaming, and model deployment.
Comparison of Key Attributes
Attribute |
InterSystems IRIS |
Snowflake |
| Primary Users | Application developers, integration engineers, data engineers, analysts, data stewards | Data analysts, SQL-based data engineers |
| Primary Workloads | Real-time, high-performance operational-analytic (HTAP/translytical) workloads | Cloud data warehousing |
| AI-Ready, Single Source of Truth | Dynamic, real-time access across distributed sources via a data fabric; no data duplication required | Centralized data warehouse; often requires ETL and data duplication |
| Deployment Flexibility | On-premises, private/public cloud, and hybrid | Cloud-only (limited to AWS, Azure, GCP) |
| Real-Time and Streaming | Native support for real-time data ingestion and analytics with sub-second latency | External tools often needed (e.g., Kafka connectors); higher latency |
| Multi-Model Support | Native support for relational, object, document, key-value, and hierarchical data | Primarily structured and semi-structured formats (JSON, Parquet, Avro) |
| Performance at Scale | Extremely high performance at scale proven in healthcare, financial services, and logistics for operational and analytical workloads | Scales adequately for analytics |
| Operational Simplicity | Full life-cycle API management, low code graphical process orchestration, as well as a business rules and a workflow engine to automate your enterprise-wide business processes | Delivers ease of use for data warehousing |
| Security & Governance | Unified lineage, policy enforcement, and role-based access control across sources | Role-based security and object tagging; complex to configure for in multi-cloud/hybrid scenarios |
InterSystems and Snowflake can be Complementary
