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I'm the author of the article. Didn't expect it to blow up. Let me clarify a few points: 1. I like Snowflake and I think they brought several innovations to th

I'm the author of the article. Didn't expect it to blow up. Let me clarify a few points: 1. I like Snowflake and I think they brought several innovations to the field: Instant scale out/up, time-travel, unstructured data query support. 2. Snowflake obviously makes innovations and performance improvements, otherwise they would not be the market leader they are. But I'm also suspecting that they make just enough performance improvements to be at par and then use the vendor lock in features to make switching hard. My argument is that their rate of performance innovation has considerably gone down and DataBricks, Firebolt, and open source alternatives just seem more attractive from a cost/performance ratio. I agree that Snowflake is still the best data-warehouse to start with if you have 100k, but not if you truly plan for a multi-year horizon and your usage expands. - Redshift also brought a lot of innovation that allowed people to execute analytical queries 100x-1000x faster than any OLTP that existed out there. I've used Redshift for four years and they kept ignoring performance and features until Snowflake came out. All of a sudden because of competitor pressure, they put more effort into the product to maintain and gain market share. My hope is that Snowflake finds a solution to their innovator's dilemma, since competitors are hot on their tails. - Some people point out that 70% usage growth just shows that Snowflake is useful. Nobody disagrees with that. The issue is that majority of the companies don't experience a 70% revenue growth to catch up with the growth in costs. At some point, you have to clamp down on costs, which means that you have to look for alternatives to run things more efficiently.

mejakethomas 4y ago
Totally agree with Redshift sentiments. It's been lovely seeing BigQuery and Redshift step their game up over the past 1.5yrs, because they really should have been doing certain things for many years prior. Re: Firebolt, I don't consider it to be in the same class as Snowflake whatsoever (even though their advertising seems to indicate otherwise). Snowflake is like a very powerful swiss army knife. Firebolt is good for a very specific (dare I say niche?) workload but falls all over itself for the vast majority of data org needs.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  > Firebolt is good for a very specific (dare I say niche?) workload but falls all over itself for the vast majority of data org needs. It runs SQL queries on structured data. Is that niche?
evtx 4y ago
Stas: "The issue is that majority of the companies don't experience a 70% revenue growth to catch up with the growth in costs" I think you are misunderstanding something very fundamental here. Snowflake has usage pricing and no one is forcing companies to use Snowflake 70% more every year. In my experience, companies are typically evaluating spend on other platforms and after some testing, moving additional workloads there to displace cost elsewhere. Let's say your Snowflake bill was $100k and you were unhappy with your your security data lake provider and replace a $1M bill there with $200k of Snowflake. Your Snowflake bill has now increased 200% to $300k, but you are still $800k ahead overall. In other words, your existing workload (the original $100k) didn't get more expensive. I've worked in data warehousing for a lot of years now and stepping back, I guess I don't understand what you are trying to accomplish here. I certainly think everyone should take a "trust but verify" approach with their vendors but honestly, I don't think you proven your case, especially since you appear to complete ignore the competitive reality these vendors live in. Beyond that, I don't think "speeds and feeds" are the most important improvements going on with these platforms at the moment. Check the monthly release notes: BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/release-notes https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/release-notes Databricks: https://docs.databricks.com/release-notes/product/index.html https://docs.databricks.com/release-notes/product/index.html Snowflake: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes.html https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes.html Performance is important but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. What percentage of features in the past two months for each of these platforms relate to performance? On the flip side, how much does your company spend on things like data governance? How much would a data breach cost? How many people maintain the platform? What do pipeline failures cost? How is connectivity to other solutions your company uses? If you look at where innovation is happening (and this is a VERY interesting space these days), the bulk of improvements are in areas arguably more important to companies. BigQuery has added migration improvements, Databricks has added Photon and Unity Catalog improvements, Snowflake has added Java and Python stored procedures. The list is miles long for all of these vendors and I challenge anyone in the space to keep up with everything. Another comment here said all of these vendors are within 10-20% performance of each other. If that is true, in my opinion you're focused on a problem that is an edge case at best. Something to watch, but not nearly as interesting or as impactful as the rapid pace of innovation across this space in all areas. IMHO.

mejakethomas 4y ago

Totally agree with Redshift sentiments. It's been lovely seeing BigQuery and Redshift step their game up over the past 1.5yrs, because they really should have been doing certain things for many years prior. Re: Firebolt, I don't consider it to be in the same class as Snowflake whatsoever (even though their advertising seems to indicate otherwise). Snowflake is like a very powerful swiss army knife. Firebolt is good for a very specific (dare I say niche?) workload but falls all over itself for the vast majority of data org needs.

mr_toad 4y ago
> Firebolt is good for a very specific (dare I say niche?) workload but falls all over itself for the vast majority of data org needs. It runs SQL queries on structured data. Is that niche?

evtx 4y ago

Stas: "The issue is that majority of the companies don't experience a 70% revenue growth to catch up with the growth in costs" I think you are misunderstanding something very fundamental here. Snowflake has usage pricing and no one is forcing companies to use Snowflake 70% more every year. In my experience, companies are typically evaluating spend on other platforms and after some testing, moving additional workloads there to displace cost elsewhere. Let's say your Snowflake bill was $100k and you were unhappy with your your security data lake provider and replace a $1M bill there with $200k of Snowflake. Your Snowflake bill has now increased 200% to $300k, but you are still $800k ahead overall. In other words, your existing workload (the original $100k) didn't get more expensive. I've worked in data warehousing for a lot of years now and stepping back, I guess I don't understand what you are trying to accomplish here. I certainly think everyone should take a "trust but verify" approach with their vendors but honestly, I don't think you proven your case, especially since you appear to complete ignore the competitive reality these vendors live in. Beyond that, I don't think "speeds and feeds" are the most important improvements going on with these platforms at the moment. Check the monthly release notes: BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/release-notes https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/release-notes Databricks: https://docs.databricks.com/release-notes/product/index.html https://docs.databricks.com/release-notes/product/index.html Snowflake: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes.html https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes.html Performance is important but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. What percentage of features in the past two months for each of these platforms relate to performance? On the flip side, how much does your company spend on things like data governance? How much would a data breach cost? How many people maintain the platform? What do pipeline failures cost? How is connectivity to other solutions your company uses? If you look at where innovation is happening (and this is a VERY interesting space these days), the bulk of improvements are in areas arguably more important to companies. BigQuery has added migration improvements, Databricks has added Photon and Unity Catalog improvements, Snowflake has added Java and Python stored procedures. The list is miles long for all of these vendors and I challenge anyone in the space to keep up with everything. Another comment here said all of these vendors are within 10-20% performance of each other. If that is true, in my opinion you're focused on a problem that is an edge case at best. Something to watch, but not nearly as interesting or as impactful as the rapid pace of innovation across this space in all areas. IMHO.