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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

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)

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)