"Posting benchmark results is bad because it quickly becomes a race to the wrong solution. But somebody showed us sucking on a benchmark, so here's our benchmark results showing we're better."
I disagree. It makes sense for Snowflake to response to what-they-think-is an unreasonably bad result published by Databricks. And they focused more on Snowflake’s result and only compared dollar cost against Databricks. It’s consistent with their philosophy that public benchmark war is beside the point and mostly a distraction.
Their cofounder was behind vectorwise, which kicked ass in benchmarks, but died as no one even heard of it.
You can run the benchmark queries fast, that's great, but can you handle code migrated from vertica? Will you optimiser come up with a good plan for queries built on 15 layers of views? That's what companies in the real world have, not some synthetic benchmark that you can make sure you can run for marketing purposes.
The thing is even that response doesn't show them to be better. As someone pointed out, they're comparing their cheapest offering with Databricks' most expensive one and saying they're 3% better in price-perf. What does someone read into that?
I'm not familiar with this realm to comment on veracity of claims but it could very well be
"Posting benchmark results is bad because it quickly becomes a race to the wrong solution. Someone misrepresented our performance in a benchmark, here are the actual results."