[thejosh]

Sounds great until you're locked into Snowflake - so glad iceberg is becoming the standard, anything is great.

The trap you end up in is you have to pay snowflake to access your data, iceberg and other technology help with the walled garden.

Not just snowflake, any pay on use provider.

(Context - have spent 5+ years working with Snowflake, it's great, have built drivers for various languages, etc).

[gigatexal]

Locked in? I mean they’re your partner. As long as you’re deriving value from them the partnership is still valuable no?

[thejosh]

Everytime you want to query your data, you need to pay the compute cost.

If instead you can write to something like Parquet/Iceberg, you're not paying for access your data.

Snowflake is great at aggregations and other stuff (seriously, huge fan of snowflakes SQL capabilities), but let's say you have a visualisation tool, you're paying for pulling data out .

Instead, writing data to something like S3, you instead can hookup your tools to this.

It's expensive to pull data out of Snowflake otherwise.

[gigatexal]

You people can’t be serious, right?

Ok so I build my data lake on s3 using all open tech. I’m still paying for S3 for puts and reads and lists.

Ok I put it on my own hardware. In my own colo. you’re still paying electricity and other things. Everything is lock in.

On top of that you’re beholden to an entire community of people and volunteers to make your tech work. Need a feature? Sponsor it. Or write it and fight to upstream it. On top of that if you do this at scale at a company what about the highly paid team of engineers you have to have to maintain all this?

With snowflake I alone could provide an entire production ready bi stack to a company. And I can do so and sleep well at night knowing it’s managed and taken care of and if it fails entire teams of people are working to fix it.

Are you going to build your own roads, your own power grid, your own police force?

Again my point remains. The vast majority of times people build on a vendor as a partner and then go on to build useful things.

Apple using cloud vendors for iCloud storage. You think they couldn’t do it themselves? They couldn’t find and pay and support all the tech their own? Of course they could. But they have better things to do than to reinvent the wheel I.e building value on top of dumb compute and that’s iCloud.

[thejosh]

After running Snowflake in production for 5+ years I would rather have my data on something like Parquet/Iceberg (which Snowflake fully supports...) than in the table format Snowflake has.

It's not that deep

[gigatexal]

Ok. And this flexibility is only really possible since they did a lot of work to make external and internal tables roughly equivalent in performance.

[thejosh]

Yeah, performance depends.

I think a hybrid approach works best (store on Snowflake native and iceberg/tables where needed), and allows you the benefit of Snowflake without paying the cost for certain workloads (which really adds up).

We're going to see more of this (either open or closed source), since Snowflake has acquired Crunchydata, and the last major bastion is "traditional" database <> Snowflake.

[nxm]

They didn't do it out of good will. They realized that's where the market was going and if their query engine didn't perform as well as others on top of iceberg, then they'd be another Oracle in the long-term.

[kortilla]

Yes, don’t be obtuse. “Vendor lock-in” is not some foreign unheard of concept.

[repeekad]

Teams of the smartest people on earth make these kind of big vendor decisions, vendor lock-in is top of mind, I tell anyone who will listen to avoid databricks live tables and their sleezy sales reps pushing it over cheaper less locked in solutions

[nojvek]

Not all vendors are same. Snowflake charges an arm and leg for compute.

It’s 36x more expensive than equivalent EC2 compute.

[enether]

yeah, this exchange reads like a sales ad

[kdazzle]

Snowflake is expensive, even compared to Databricks, and you pay their pre-AWS discount storage price while they get the discount and pocket the difference as profit