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Why is Snowflake so expensive

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Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#31

Post by deepGem »

cs702 wrote: post #7

Great article. On the surface, it's about Snowflake. At a deeper level, the article is about the perverse incentives motivating SaaS businesses to do seemingly dumb, inefficient things and avoid seemingly obvious optimizations by default. Many SaaS businesses are perfectly happy to let customers shoot themselves in the foot if it generates more revenue. The BigQuery example (presently, by default, `select * from tabl…

Wow their statement about not participating in benchmarking wars is alarming. In this day and age, when benchmarking tools are so inexpensive and almost everything is very transparent, why not participate.

Or even better engage with a neutral third party such as Jepsen to get on an even playing field and duke it out.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#32

Post by beoberha »

I disagree with the assertion that Snowflake has no incentive to improve performance. While I don’t work for Snowflake, I work for a competitor and we’re constantly looking to improve performance to make customers happy.

For the exact reason that the article claims Snowflake wouldn’t innovate, I’d assert that they would. If they are expensive and slow, and a competitor is faster and cheaper, eventually they will see business move to the competitor. We see it all the time.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#33

Post by kalimoxto »

soheil wrote: post #21
cs702 wrote: post #7

Great article. On the surface, it's about Snowflake. At a deeper level, the article is about the perverse incentives motivating SaaS businesses to do seemingly dumb, inefficient things and avoid seemingly obvious optimizations by default. Many SaaS businesses are perfectly happy to let customers shoot themselves in the foot if it generates more revenue. The BigQuery example (presently, by default, `select * from tabl…

If that lowers the barrier to entry without having expert level knowledge to know what a full table scan even means why not? Instead of hiring a dba maybe you could hire an intern instead and happily eat the cost of Snowflake.

I think the point of the article is that an optimizer doesn't affect the barrier to entry at all, but adding it would save end users quite a bit of money. So they don't do it because end users' money is revenue for Snowflake/Alphabet

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#34

Post by mritchie712 »

I predict[0] we'll see more people choosing Clickhouse over Snowflake in the next 5 years. Clickhouse will get reasonably feature compatible with Snowflake and give people a better escape hatch if they want to self-host their data stack. Clickhouse, Inc is building a cloud product that abstracts away the complexity and there's already companies like Altinity that will spin up a cluster for you in minutes.

0 - https://blog.luabase.com/clickhouse-for-data-nerds/

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#35

Post by ramesh31 »

mritchie712 wrote: post #34

I predict[0] we'll see more people choosing Clickhouse over Snowflake in the next 5 years. Clickhouse will get reasonably feature compatible with Snowflake and give people a better escape hatch if they want to self-host their data stack. Clickhouse, Inc is building a cloud product that abstracts away the complexity and there's already companies like Altinity that will spin up a cluster for you in minutes. 0 - https:/…

Isn't Clickhouse a hosted SQL DBMS? Not really comparable to a cloud data lake.

Snowflake/Databricks scales infinitely across cloud object stores like S3. Clickhouse is run as a single (or sharded) process that uses the local file system like any other SQL database, and requires volume provisioning as your data scales. It also has a fixed run cost (EC2 or wherever it's hosted) versus an "on-demand" model where read clusters are spun up to run queries against static objects that have no fixed cost other than storage pricing.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#37

Post by KingOfCoders »

ramesh31 wrote: post #35
mritchie712 wrote: post #34

I predict[0] we'll see more people choosing Clickhouse over Snowflake in the next 5 years. Clickhouse will get reasonably feature compatible with Snowflake and give people a better escape hatch if they want to self-host their data stack. Clickhouse, Inc is building a cloud product that abstracts away the complexity and there's already companies like Altinity that will spin up a cluster for you in minutes. 0 - https:/…

Isn't Clickhouse a hosted SQL DBMS? Not really comparable to a cloud data lake. Snowflake/Databricks scales infinitely across cloud object stores like S3. Clickhouse is run as a single (or sharded) process that uses the local file system like any other SQL database, and requires volume provisioning as your data scales. It also has a fixed run cost (EC2 or wherever it's hosted) versus an "on-demand" model where read c…

In which way not comparable?

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#39

Post by KingOfCoders »

toto444 wrote: post #23

The competition is tough in the data warehousing industry, if Snowflake is expensive people will know. Current customers may not leave but it's going to be harder for them to get new customers.

Everyone seems expensive (Looker seems to be the most expensive), and vendors are hard to compare. When evaluting some of them for a migration project, they would not let us run performance tests with our data to compare them and make a decision (paid).

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#40

Post by glenjamin »

I don't know if this is the case at Snowflake, but there are similar seemingly misaligned incentives with CircleCI's build-seconds-based pricing model.

However, the generally accepted wisdom there was that improving performance had always led to more builds being run - and so still come out as a net-positive. This had happened a bunch of times as we upgraded CPUs or storage drivers or the version - there'd be a short term drop in direct revenue, but then it would bounce back quickly as people took advantage of being able to do more stuff in the same amount of time.

I'm told the revenue and finance people were pretty concerned the first time it happened though!

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