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Comment by hilbertseries | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, tech savy bay area companies can setup their own stack using Presto etc but rest of the world is not like that.

My last company was an early adopter of Snowflake. And we tried Presto first, circa 2016 and Presto was sloooow. We were using vertica at the time and it was so much slower. Snowflake on the other hand was able to perform on the same order of latency as Vertica, which was pretty crazy to us.

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That's interesting. I thought Vertica's pitch was real-time analytics for which draditional disk based data-warehouses are too slow.

Vertica is a disk based analyctics database. It was very fast, but also very expensive. And hardware failures could be particularly difficult to recover from.

Vertica was very powerful for us but the separation of compute from storage was a critical feature of SF that motivated us to switch. We evaluated EON mode but SF was too easy. But from performance were also running nightly batch processing on a 22 node Vertica cluster that was taking 6 hours per night to run on highly optimized projections. We threw the same query at SF and 8XL cluster and it finished in about 30 minutes. The biggest difference however is cost where we are spending more on SF than we otherwise would have on Vertica.

SF prices may have raised. We had a 48 node cluster in AWS, which wasn’t cheap obviously and our license was also seven figures a year. And we got a good deal from Snowflake because we were an early large customer. One big advantage for us was that we could auto scale snowflake based on our load to save more money.

So why did you switch from Vertica (or did you)?

Vertica was too expensive, their licensing fees were terrible at our scale. Operations were also awful, if we had two nodes go down we were always in trouble. We built an EBS solution that made it a little better, but it still wasn’t tenable long term.

Good info -- thanks.

Their Eon mode product is very similar to Snowflake, with S3 storage and semi-dynamic compute nodes, but they may not be as slick at marketing it or providing a UI.

Yes Eon is similar BUT it is not nearly as turnkey. Agree it is not well marketed.

My previous company still uses Vertica (on-prem) but it still wasn't as fast as it should be. Trying to hire anyone for an operations team was an enterprise in futility, since it's a rather niche tech. Maybe it would've been better in the cloud, but here large companies are cautious about vendor lock-in and after 2014, potential impact of sanctions.

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