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by sanderjd 1038 days ago
> you pay relatively little if you do relatively little data processing

Yep, surprised how few people have been mentioning this here.

Compared with running a managed postgres instance 100% of the time, running a snowflake xs warehouse for a few minutes a day can be significantly cheaper.
1 comments
hodgesrm 1037 days ago
The reason is that Snowflake charges close to cost for object storage and they compress your data when they put it in.

However...that means they need to make it up elsewhere. When you do get around to running queries the markup on compute can be 5-10x (or potentially more) depending on the plan you are using. If you do constant, compute heavy aggregation Snowflake is not the right place to do it.

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sanderjd 1037 days ago
Yes, but my point is, lots of small businesses come out ahead on this.

Which is totally by design! Their whole model is that once it is no longer cost effective, it isn't worth the switching costs to leave. (Exactly like the AWS model, un-coincidentally.)

But I think lots of commenters here (at least at the time I wrote my original comment) seem to be missing that this isn't nefarious or anything, it's win-win for a lot of businesses.

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