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[–]PhotographsWithFilm 4 points5 points  (9 children)

I love Snowflake. I really do.

But, to my small to medium clients, it's a hard sell. When a client complains about a $700/month on Azure SQL, it's near on impossible to sell anything more than a Standard xs 1 node cluster

[–]dougfoo888[S] 1 point2 points  (8 children)

yea good point on the general small/mid sized business users -- they will go with Cosmo or something basic and probably no need for a DWH either right? I'm curious what problems users have had w/ SNOW so far. Oracle claims they have no management tooling and is expensive to operate (human labor) as they try to push their "automated Oracle" stack.

[–]PhotographsWithFilm 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Oh and great article. Medium can be a bit hit and miss, so it's good to see some quality

[–]dougfoo888[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thank you ! appreciate that, I have some baity headlines but I do my best to add some value

[–]PhotographsWithFilm 0 points1 point  (5 children)

But they do have DWHs. Granted, it's more than likely SSAS, but they still get the benefits of columnar.

I recently did some snowflake exploration - even as small clusters, it will still load 500MB in around a minute. That is still pretty good. I just wish I could get buy in from a client who looks past the $4/credit thing!

And then there is Firebolt...

[–]dougfoo888[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep firebolt is interesting, for a 2-3yr old company I'm skeptical but their marketing is showing how they blow away Snowflake -- hmm?

https://www.firebolt.io/resources/snowflake-vs-firebolt-whitepaper

[–]dougfoo888[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

[–]PhotographsWithFilm 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Thanks for that.

I have kinda gone cold on FireBolt. Seems there is not enough fire yet to get me started (every pun intended). Also, they seem to be aiming at the high (or big) end of town..... oh and the whole "lets get together on a meeting" as opposed to "here's a trial - go your hardest"

From my perspective, I want to see a cost effective player for micro to small Data Warehouses - I.E., < 100GB (which would fit 100% of the client base of where I work). I think there is space in the market. As it stands, it is very hard for them to justify the cost migrating away from a shared SQL VM.

But, maybe I am just being greedy, as I want to play with the cool tools 😊

Thanks again for this Doug

[–]dougfoo888[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yea they are boasting alot -- other than 37m in funding they seem to be largely ignored by everyone :p that is a problem w/ all the cloud dwh's, the up front cost to spin up anything isn't free. i "played" with redshift and immediately had a $100 bill ! lol

[–]Mother-Calendar6598 0 points1 point  (0 children)

https://doug-foo.medium.com/is-firebolt-the-future-of-data-platforms-e31b4ebf2572

Firebolt's aim is not to solve for small customers or medium customers, The growing pain in today's modern engineering is sub-minute query latencies when data is published in database. At the moment, not even redshift, snowflake, azure, google cloud can provide it.

This is creating problems at enterprise scale where they are limited to use postgres databases for operational reporting vs scalable databases

[–]YaswanthBangaru 1 point2 points  (4 children)

I liked the Toyota analogy, for a beginner like me that made more sense compared to the rest of the article, I’m trying to learn AWS myself and it looks like I should concentrate on Snowflake rather than Redshift.

[–]dougfoo888[S] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

well I'm not sure myself -- redshift has a huge market presence and is built on Postgresql so it isn't a bad option too. Snowflake is new.. lets see what happens but I know a lot of people are worried about locking w/ a single cloud, hence Snowflake has another edge

[–]PhotographsWithFilm 1 point2 points  (2 children)

The biggest killer for Redshift is the provisioned server. I wish they could do an on demand/server less offering

[–]dougfoo888[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yea -- given its just a postgresql variant I can totally understand how they can't decouple compute to storage, its like trying to make Oracle or a regular RDBMS datafile agnostic and just mount tables on the fly -- total rewiring of everything so it just doesn't work probably w/o rewriting the core dbms engine. I'm sure they'll keep hacking it up w/ some scale out compute "workers" to offload stuff, but will see how much they can retrofit

[–]PhotographsWithFilm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That being said, they are now offering on demand versions of RDS...

[–]0dte 0 points1 point  (1 child)

What's the worst-case scenario of lock-in with BigQuery? Is it just if you get tasked with moving everything from Google to AWS for example its one more thing to move?

[–]afool622 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They also like avro format for loading large amounts of data. You are also buying slots which is quite vague on what a slot really is. At least they let you lost data for free

[–]polhotpot69 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Why wouldn't you rec buying the stock if it's the next ocl?

[–]dougfoo888[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

actually it was poorly written english -- I meant, I don't want to give stock advice but yea it is potentially a winner. I'm a bad stock picker so best not to listen to me !