Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by FridgeSeal 2351 days ago
For what it’s worth, I’ve used Clickhouse and Snowflake and I strongly prefer Clickhouse.

Performance was superior, client libraries and built-in HTTP interface was a god-send, it supported geospatial queries. I had perpetual issues with getting Snowflake to properly escape strings in CSV, handle JSON in anything approaching a sensible way, there’s claims that it integrates properly with Kafka as a consumer, but it most certainly does not. The UX is horrible to boot.
1 comments
manigandham 2351 days ago
What were the issues with JSON? Snowflake is the best cloud data warehouse when it comes to support for unstructured data and far better than Redshift, Bigquery or the others. Snowflake also has geo support.

It doesn't support streaming data though so things like Kafka aren't a good fit yet. They have a connector but it's basically a little app that automates consuming from Kafka, writing files to S3, then loading them into your tables.

link
FridgeSeal 2351 days ago
Getting it to export JSON was needlessly complicated, those Variant type columns are the worst.

Does it have geospatial support now? Because they definitely didn’t have it when I used it.

Ultimately though, I don’t see enough benefits of SF over CH: feature set overlaps but with no real winner features. observed performance was worse, the client libraries are few and far between and not great, and no HTTP interface, and no real streaming support. On top of being hideously expensive, and closed source.

link
manigandham 2351 days ago
Yes it has geospatial support. Variant columns are better than every other database so far. Redshift and Bigquery just have a text field and require far more verbose commands to operate and cast. It sounds like most of your issues are with importing and exporting data rather than querying it?

Snowflake is basically EC2 servers reading files from S3 so you get more bandwidth with a larger warehouse size but it's fundamental limit and will have much higher latency compared to running on a local SSD with clickhouse. Lack of streaming is a known problem. They actually do have an HTTP interface, you just don't see it but that's how all the ODBC drivers are implemented (with HTTP calls and JSON data in the background).

If your data fits or you don't mind the operational overhead of running your own data warehouse then it's almost always a cheaper and faster option.

link