What are you using atm? After dealing with Redshift for a few years, Snowflake was and continues to be a breath of fresh air.
General analytics queries for the like of dashboards, CH latencies in the order of < 100ms, Snowflake about a second. Snowflake couldn’t do Geospatial queries when I had to use it, but I was getting responses from CH in like 40ms for a dataset of 10’s millions of points.
This guy has done some really in depth benchmarks: https://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-clickhouse.html
And https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html
CH is one of the fastest non-GPU databases there.
Scaling redshift up and down was a nightmare. Tracking files on ingestion was a nightmare. Semi-structured data into structured data was a nightmare. i could also go on...
I'm a very early customer, and a big fan of SF if you couldn't tell.
- Performance from tables not cached on the warehouse instance is awful. That the price you pay for shutting a warehouse down.
- I wish it were cheaper. If you run queries against a warehouse 24/7, preventing from auto-shutdown, you better hope it's tiny. And even then, the cost might incentivize you to employ a different strategy entirely.
The other stuff you mention is them building a moat around your data lake. They're pretty good at that. I'd happily get locked into Snowflake for the moment. Redshift really does look like an amateur hour product in comparison to the tools you get with Snowflake.
Even then, as good as Snowflake is, our internal users went from complaining about the performance of Looker and Redshift to complaining about the performance of Tableau and Snowflake. I don't know if you can ever please anyone in this space...