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Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

The reason snowflake has such a high market cap is because it’s customers aren’t paying much now, but they’ll be paying and paying monthly forever. It’s lock-in on a massive scale.

Delta lake is something you can run on data you feel you still have some semblance of control over.

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I work for Snowflake and I'm always curious about this way of thinking. How is putting the data in Snowflake any different to any other RDBMS, or even S3, in this regard?

You don't own the underlying storage, true, but there's a defined method of getting data in and a defined method of getting that data out. The API is different to S3, sure, but it's an API all the same.

When I want to process something in Snowflake I would have to copy the data

    1. from snowflake storage to s3
    2. from s3 to my compute node
    3. do the processing
    4. store result in s3
    5. copy result from s3 to snowflake storage

If I only use s3, my data gies like this

    1. s3 to compute node
    2. run my script
    3. result to s3

Perhaps I could use bunch if insert statement and load data into Snowflake through sql straight feom compute node, but then at a great cost.

I don't really see much benefit of using Snowflake for not-yet structured data. For structured data it works wonders. Only downsides there:

    1. Expensive as f when you scale up
    2. can't control cost in pay-per-query model.

> but they’ll be paying and paying monthly forever. It’s lock-in on a massive scale.

Is making money by tricking customers into product lock in really a good business strategy. Wouldn't the word get out sooner or later?

dont you have to pay aws for s3,emr /data engineers monthly and forever too.

FWIW the only organisation I know that's ever truly locked in data was SAP, through their byzantine licensing and horrific API. Snowflake is no more locked in than anything else with a standard SQL interface.

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