Finally Migrating from Redshift to Snowflake. Share your experience?

1 point·gutenberg··2 comments

We are finally migrating from Amazon Redshift to Snowflake. I've read a lot about the "pros" but I am wondering, are there any downsides we should expect from the switch? What should we pay more attention to now that we don't have to worry about performance anymore?

View on HN

Redshift is very predictable in terms of cost because of their pricing model. But the bottleneck becomes query performance. When you run a lot of concurrent queries, you may experience queue wait time. The recent launch of Concurrency Scaling mitigates that a fair bit though.

For Snowflake, it's the other way around. Because Snowflake separates compute and storage out of the box, Snowflake will spin up more resources to handle the peak load in queries. So you'll have to watch your $$$.

Snowflake comes with less knobs to turn ("zero admin"), and that's a convenience we've seen lots of data engineers appreciate. In short, you're trading convenience for cost predictability.

We currently support Amazon Redshift with intermix.io for performance monitoring. We are looking to build out support for Snowflake for query and cost monitoring. If there's anybody on this thread who is open for an exploratory call about Snowflake, please shoot me a note at lars at intermix dot io.

Snowflake has one answer to every question. Use more compute == Spend more money. E.g. Q: “This query is 2x slower than Redshift?” A: $

Reply on news.ycombinator.com