3 ms·

What are you using atm? After dealing with Redshift for a few years, Snowflake was and continues to be a breath of fresh air.

jrott 6y ago
Snowflake is pretty nice compared to redshift. Though I really wish there copying data out of s3 worked better then it does.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  They are actively working on those features from what I hear. Parquet export, partition control, etc.
- ironchef 6y ago
  Which part don’t you like? We’ve used snow pipes and it seems to work quite well.
Redsquare 6y ago
Try clickhouse
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  Seconding this. Far superior performance, far better features.
  - hodgesrm 6y ago
    Just out of curiosity, superior performance on which workloads? Thanks!
    - FridgeSeal 6y ago
      Pretty much everything I threw at both, Clickhouse did fatter. I never benchmarks write speeds properly, but I do know CH is capable of high write performance. General analytics queries for the like of dashboards, CH latencies in the order of < 100ms, Snowflake about a second. Snowflake couldn’t do Geospatial queries when I had to use it, but I was getting responses from CH in like 40ms for a dataset of 10’s millions of points. This guy has done some really in depth benchmarks: https://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-clickhouse.html https://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-clickhouse.html And https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html CH is one of the fastest non-GPU databases there.
      - hodgesrm 6y ago
        Thanks!
jshen 6y ago
Big query has been great for me.
ramraj07 6y ago
Exactly the same experience. The best data lake model and experience I've ever had and will wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.
panarky 6y ago
In your experience, what does Snowflake to better than Redshift?
- chrisjc 6y ago
  Compute/Storage separation, instant shut/scale up/down (horizontally/vertically), multi-warehouse, Semi-structured queries, change streams for tables and external tables, external tables (data-lake), stored procedures, UDF/UDTFs, cloud agnostic (AWS, Azure, Google), data-exchange/data-sharing, CLI and drivers, external functions (remote inference engine invocation), snowpipe (ingest files even when your warehouses are down), tasks (DAGs), i could go on... Scaling redshift up and down was a nightmare. Tracking files on ingestion was a nightmare. Semi-structured data into structured data was a nightmare. i could also go on... I'm a very early customer, and a big fan of SF if you couldn't tell.
  - zten 6y ago
    Two things I could wish for: - Performance from tables not cached on the warehouse instance is awful. That the price you pay for shutting a warehouse down. - I wish it were cheaper. If you run queries against a warehouse 24/7, preventing from auto-shutdown, you better hope it's tiny. And even then, the cost might incentivize you to employ a different strategy entirely. The other stuff you mention is them building a moat around your data lake. They're pretty good at that. I'd happily get locked into Snowflake for the moment. Redshift really does look like an amateur hour product in comparison to the tools you get with Snowflake. Even then, as good as Snowflake is, our internal users went from complaining about the performance of Looker and Redshift to complaining about the performance of Tableau and Snowflake. I don't know if you can ever please anyone in this space...

jrott 6y ago

Snowflake is pretty nice compared to redshift. Though I really wish there copying data out of s3 worked better then it does.

ramraj07 6y ago
They are actively working on those features from what I hear. Parquet export, partition control, etc.
ironchef 6y ago
Which part don’t you like? We’ve used snow pipes and it seems to work quite well.

Redsquare 6y ago

Try clickhouse

FridgeSeal 6y ago
Seconding this. Far superior performance, far better features.
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  Just out of curiosity, superior performance on which workloads? Thanks!
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    Pretty much everything I threw at both, Clickhouse did fatter. I never benchmarks write speeds properly, but I do know CH is capable of high write performance. General analytics queries for the like of dashboards, CH latencies in the order of < 100ms, Snowflake about a second. Snowflake couldn’t do Geospatial queries when I had to use it, but I was getting responses from CH in like 40ms for a dataset of 10’s millions of points. This guy has done some really in depth benchmarks: https://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-clickhouse.html https://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-clickhouse.html And https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html CH is one of the fastest non-GPU databases there.
    - hodgesrm 6y ago
      Thanks!

jshen 6y ago

Big query has been great for me.

ramraj07 6y ago

Exactly the same experience. The best data lake model and experience I've ever had and will wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.

panarky 6y ago

In your experience, what does Snowflake to better than Redshift?

chrisjc 6y ago
Compute/Storage separation, instant shut/scale up/down (horizontally/vertically), multi-warehouse, Semi-structured queries, change streams for tables and external tables, external tables (data-lake), stored procedures, UDF/UDTFs, cloud agnostic (AWS, Azure, Google), data-exchange/data-sharing, CLI and drivers, external functions (remote inference engine invocation), snowpipe (ingest files even when your warehouses are down), tasks (DAGs), i could go on... Scaling redshift up and down was a nightmare. Tracking files on ingestion was a nightmare. Semi-structured data into structured data was a nightmare. i could also go on... I'm a very early customer, and a big fan of SF if you couldn't tell.
- zten 6y ago
  Two things I could wish for: - Performance from tables not cached on the warehouse instance is awful. That the price you pay for shutting a warehouse down. - I wish it were cheaper. If you run queries against a warehouse 24/7, preventing from auto-shutdown, you better hope it's tiny. And even then, the cost might incentivize you to employ a different strategy entirely. The other stuff you mention is them building a moat around your data lake. They're pretty good at that. I'd happily get locked into Snowflake for the moment. Redshift really does look like an amateur hour product in comparison to the tools you get with Snowflake. Even then, as good as Snowflake is, our internal users went from complaining about the performance of Looker and Redshift to complaining about the performance of Tableau and Snowflake. I don't know if you can ever please anyone in this space...