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Why is Snowflake so expensive

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Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#41

Post by PaulWaldman »

beoberha wrote: post #32

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…

Chrun for these services take a long time. They are "sticky" and have the baggage of enterprise agreements. With the switching costs never being zero, if SLAs are being met, it's exceedingly difficult to switch vendors.

Alternatively there is a faster impact on new sign-ups when falling behind competitors on costs and benchmarks.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#42

Post by dominotw »

nojito wrote: post #25
jeffwask wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah...100%. It's expensive til you try running a data warehouse yourself and have to hire in to support it. Like any other service there are scale points where it no longer makes sense but for most smaller orgs it's still a bargain over DIY

We did a cost analysis and found databricks and BQ to be cheaper than a similar snowflake build out. I think people are falling into a trap of not considering costs because “it takes care of everything”.

> cost analysis and found databricks and BQ to be cheaper than a similar snowflake build out.

Wouldn't this mean snowflake has priced their product not competitively. Why would they do that if its so obvious that everyone would just save money from switching to DB.

> I think people are falling into a trap

This is their product strategy? to take advantage of gullible businesses falling into their trap.

Surely building a whole business around customers falling into trap has to backfire at some point.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#43

Post by morelisp »

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…

ClickHouse can access non-local storage without issue (or at least, with only issues for some of them - HDFS and S3 seem to work fine, I've had less luck with real-time Kafka). I'm not sure how well it scales horizontally for such uses; you can hack something up with macros that isn't too painful but there may also be better options.

However, it's probably not a great pick if you're already struggling with the operations side of things, which seems to be the main selling point for services like Snowflake.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#44

Post by dominotw »

jwie wrote: post #2

You would think they would be saving (and charging the customer!) a bundle not enforcing constraints on their tables. I’d be very interested to hear the Snowflake side of this decision, but to the customer it’s simply unforgivable to have cosmetic constraints on a database.

Because snowflake doesn't build foreign key indexes. Imagine clickstream data where every insert is being checked against an index of customers. This isn't a typical usecase for big data warehouses.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#45

Post by florbo »

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.

It doesn't lower barriers to entry, it's contrary to logical expectations for someone unfamiliar with how BQ works. If the query is limited to 10 results you wouldn't expect it to scan all 2 trillion of your records. Granted there are numerous warnings in the GUI for these types of things but make this mistake in Python and you're none the wiser.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#46

Post by flyinglizard »

Where does all this data go? It's processed and then what? Sent to decision makers? Used to run automated processes?

I'm genuinely curious and would appreciate anyone who could show a real life example of this kind of pipeline where data is accumulated, then processed, then turned into revenue at the other end.

I've implemented systems that do this but my experience is that accumulating data is (too) easy, processing it in a meaningful way is slightly more challenging but ultimately driving positive business processes according to this data, which require a lot of friction with employees (training, procedures, maintenance, support) is the most difficult part.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#47

Post by altdataseller »

Aulig wrote: post #28
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…

It feels like these companies haven't found the right value metric to price along. Ideally it should align with the value the customer receives.

But that's almost impossible to measure by Snowflake. How would they know how much more revenue you earned because you use Snowflake?

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#48

Post by soheil »

kalimoxto wrote: post #33
soheil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you could just add an optimizer why doesn't the db engine just do that?

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#49

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#50

Post by jwie »

dominotw wrote: post #44
jwie wrote: post #2

You would think they would be saving (and charging the customer!) a bundle not enforcing constraints on their tables. I’d be very interested to hear the Snowflake side of this decision, but to the customer it’s simply unforgivable to have cosmetic constraints on a database.

Because snowflake doesn't build foreign key indexes. Imagine clickstream data where every insert is being checked against an index of customers. This isn't a typical usecase for big data warehouses.

I understand that. But why have constraints that don’t do anything?
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