[benreesman]

Column stores on DFS are without a doubt tricky beasts. It’s a very rich field technically.

I guess I’m trying to get a read on whether their core competency / moat is distributed columnar query technology or sales/support/marketing.

[colinmhayes]

Snowflake is slower and more expensive than competitors. I'd say its moat is mostly that its extremely easy to set up and start using without technical support. If you've just got a small team and no one wants to do data engineering snowflake makes that possible, or at least much easier. Most users are generally happy, and they've followed the cloud playbook of making it hard to switch off, so even when teams have scaled to the level where secondary indexes and data support staff makes sense the team is still happy with snowflake.