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But, also very expensive. You can do queries on a spark cluster for tiny fractions of what they charge. But, snowflake makes things easy for the "decision maker
by afpx 6y ago
But, also very expensive. You can do queries on a spark cluster for tiny fractions of what they charge. But, snowflake makes things easy for the "decision makers" (who know SQL). So, all good.
- jwatte 6y agoHaving run a medium size Spark cluster, I'm not sure I agree. If you have 80-100% utilization for a month, perhaps, but the beauty of Snowflake is that you can spin up a 3XL warehouse for a few MINUTES to get answers fast, and then shut it down again and don't pay anything. Saying "you could run it on self-managed Spark/Oracle/Hive/SQLite" is approximately the same argument as saying "I can run a web server cheaper myself than paying Amazon for an EC2 instance" -- there are cases where that is true, but there are many, many, cases where the "on demand capacity" is the bigger benefit.
- filesystem 6y agoI'm not sure how the pricing compares, but there are SaaS spark cluster offerings. Databricks is probably the biggest.
- zhte415 6y ago> the beauty of Snowflake is that you can spin up a 3XL warehouse for a few MINUTES to get answers fast, and then shut it down again and don't pay anything Is this why they're making a $350mn annual loss? A million dollars a day loss would be a pretty big deal to me.