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These > OLAP systems like Druid and Clickhouse And these > data warehouses like Snowflake and Redshift Are fundamentally the same, and I’m yet to see any rea

These > OLAP systems like Druid and Clickhouse And these > data warehouses like Snowflake and Redshift Are fundamentally the same, and I’m yet to see any reason other than “marketing shenanigans” and “avoiding benchmarks” as to why they should be given their own special category. Call them all modern olap, or call them all data warehouses, doesn’t matter. > general-purpose data placement algorithm for query serving systems that improves latency by maximizing query parallelism, spreading out shards that are frequently queried together. This is cool, it will be interesting to know if the added parallelism wins over network overhead and added coordination required. Maybe there’s ways to shift where that line lies as well?

richieartoul 4y ago
I would say one major difference between those two categories of systems is that Druid/Clickhouse are designed to be deployed in "user-facing" settings directly where you can put queries to them in the critical path of your app, whereas I've never head of anyone doing that for Snowflake/Redshift. I'm sure you could, but I bet the cost would be prohibitive and I'm not sure how well they'd handle the concurrency without a lot of safe guards in your application.
- FridgeSeal 4y ago
  I’ve been on a project where we _experimented_ putting Snowflake on a user-facing path. It was expensive and ineffectual. Given that the likes of ClickHouse and Druid can be made user facing, and support backend analytics workloads, doesn’t that just imply that Snowflake/redshift are just outright less capable?
  - richieartoul 4y ago
    Not really. Clickhouse is amazing, but if you want to run it at massive scale you’ll have to invest a lot into sharding and clustering and all that. Druid is more distributed by default, but doesn’t support as sophisticated of queries as Clickhouse does. Neither Clickhouse nor Druid can hold a candle to what Snowflake can do in terms of query capabilities, as well as the flexibility and richness of their product. That’s just scratching the surface. They’re completely different product categories IMO, although they have a lot of technical / architectural overlap depending on how much you squint. Devil is in the details basically.
    - FridgeSeal 4y ago
      > Neither Clickhouse nor Druid can hold a candle to what Snowflake can do in terms of query capabilities, as well as the flexibility and richness of their product. Do you have something specific in mind? My previous experience with Snowflake was the query functionality was lacking, performance was subpar (at best), and half the purported features were a joke (looking at you “Kafka integration”) or just gimmicky (the time travel feature)
      - AdamProut 4y ago
        Clickhouse and Druid are not very good at complex OLAP queries. Clickhouse is pretty upfront about needing to denormalize your schema To avoid distributed joins. Neither are anywhere close to the performance of top DWs on analytical benchmarks like TPC-H or TPC-DS
  - AdamProut 4y ago
    SingleStoreDB is heavily used for this type of app. We used to call this use case real-time analytics (though it has many other names today) [1] https://www.singlestore.com/blog/the-technical-capabilities-your-database-needs-for-real-time-analytics/ https://www.singlestore.com/blog/the-technical-capabilities-... (Disclosure: SingleStoreDB cofounder)

richieartoul 4y ago

I would say one major difference between those two categories of systems is that Druid/Clickhouse are designed to be deployed in "user-facing" settings directly where you can put queries to them in the critical path of your app, whereas I've never head of anyone doing that for Snowflake/Redshift. I'm sure you could, but I bet the cost would be prohibitive and I'm not sure how well they'd handle the concurrency without a lot of safe guards in your application.

FridgeSeal 4y ago
I’ve been on a project where we _experimented_ putting Snowflake on a user-facing path. It was expensive and ineffectual. Given that the likes of ClickHouse and Druid can be made user facing, and support backend analytics workloads, doesn’t that just imply that Snowflake/redshift are just outright less capable?
- richieartoul 4y ago
  Not really. Clickhouse is amazing, but if you want to run it at massive scale you’ll have to invest a lot into sharding and clustering and all that. Druid is more distributed by default, but doesn’t support as sophisticated of queries as Clickhouse does. Neither Clickhouse nor Druid can hold a candle to what Snowflake can do in terms of query capabilities, as well as the flexibility and richness of their product. That’s just scratching the surface. They’re completely different product categories IMO, although they have a lot of technical / architectural overlap depending on how much you squint. Devil is in the details basically.
  - FridgeSeal 4y ago
    > Neither Clickhouse nor Druid can hold a candle to what Snowflake can do in terms of query capabilities, as well as the flexibility and richness of their product. Do you have something specific in mind? My previous experience with Snowflake was the query functionality was lacking, performance was subpar (at best), and half the purported features were a joke (looking at you “Kafka integration”) or just gimmicky (the time travel feature)
    - AdamProut 4y ago
      Clickhouse and Druid are not very good at complex OLAP queries. Clickhouse is pretty upfront about needing to denormalize your schema To avoid distributed joins. Neither are anywhere close to the performance of top DWs on analytical benchmarks like TPC-H or TPC-DS
- AdamProut 4y ago
  SingleStoreDB is heavily used for this type of app. We used to call this use case real-time analytics (though it has many other names today) [1] https://www.singlestore.com/blog/the-technical-capabilities-your-database-needs-for-real-time-analytics/ https://www.singlestore.com/blog/the-technical-capabilities-... (Disclosure: SingleStoreDB cofounder)