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Why is Snowflake so expensive

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Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#71

Post by spmurrayzzz »

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…

Well said. I'd also add a cynical note that the recurring revenue model is incentivized to keep the gremlins around not just because of the impact to metered costs, but also because off-ramping is that much more difficult once engineers implement workaround/solutions to mitigate the impact of those smells.

Just another way that vendor lock-in occurs (intentionally or otherwise).

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#72

Post by klysm »

carlineng wrote: post #58

[Disclaimer: former Snowflake employee] Snowflake is not expensive because of perverse incentives, which is the primary claim of the article. It is expensive because it is a highly differentiated and very sticky product. As others have mentioned, competition is the ultimate incentive to work on performance. Every dollar of Snowflake revenue is a dollar of revenue that Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Databricks are figh…

They aren’t exclusive. They also have perverse incentives to leave optimization gremlins in, even if they are very low hanging fruit to remove. They also have the incentive to not document them well.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#74

Post by evtx »

jwie wrote: post #50
dominotw wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are plenty of reasons why MPP databases allow the definition of constraints but don't enforce them. I'll list two: 1) BI tools can use them to optimize joins 2) Data modeling tools can use them to reverse engineers models without having to pattern match the keys.

That said, Snowflake does support constraints if you use hybrid tables (a preview feature announced at their last conference).

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#75

Post by kolinko »

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…

in case of BigQuery it makes sense though - they use map reduce on distributed clusters, so there is no easy way to stop after 10 results are found

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#76

Post by epberry »

> Not providing observability to monitor and reduce costs

Vantage just launched this - https://www.vantage.sh/blog/vantage-launches-snowflake-suppo.... The problems the author describes are almost exactly what we heard from customers:

- list of users/queries that are the most expensive

- alerts and notifications for costs

- query timeout. Not something a third party can do but there is an interesting 'query tagging' feature for snowflake which Vantage supports.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#77

Post by dcow »

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…

I was thinking about this too. Why don’t SaaS companies just force price increases to offset their broken pricing model? Nobody would care, you’re paying the same you were paying yesterday. If you’re still the best in class product with sticky features people will stay. If not and you’re competing, then you have the opportunity to reduce the price in the future or simply not increase it and let users see lower bills which might also retain them.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#78

Post by alberth »

This is all much simpler than the post makes it sound.

It's usage-based pricing and customers are using more of it.

> a customer that joins a year ago and spends $1 is paying out well over $1.7 a year later

The entire article is based on this 1.7x "net dollar expansion" statement.

After integrating Snowflake, customers have found value in using Snowflake and are using more of it 1 year later.

Since Snowflake is billed on usage, that explains the net-dollar expansion.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#79

Post by JimmyAustin »

kolinko wrote: post #75
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…

in case of BigQuery it makes sense though - they use map reduce on distributed clusters, so there is no easy way to stop after 10 results are found

It's pretty easy to limit the number of results returned by each partition to by limited to 10, then have that further reduced to 10 total during the reduce step.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#80

Post by nycdatasci »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #37
ramesh31 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From the article: "JOIN's are also not nearly as performant as in other cloud data warehouses." This seems like a pretty significant limitation.
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