It's interesting to see how PG can be configured, but why not just use a real warehouse like Snowflake?
Also, do you have any numbers on how PG performs once it's configured?
Also, do you have any numbers on how PG performs once it's configured?
Foreign data wrappers are another thing that might be compelling — dunno if Snowflake has an equivalent.
I don't have any numbers but PG has served me fine for basic pseudo-warehousing. Relative to real solutions, it's pretty bad at truly columnar workloads: scans across a small number of columns in wide tables. The "Use Fewer Columns" advice FTA is solid. This hasn't been a deal breaker though. Analytical query time has been fine if not great up to low tens of GB table size, beyond that it gets rough.
In my own testing PG performed very similarly to a 'real' warehouse. It's hard to measure because I didn't have the same datasets across several warehouses. Maybe in the future I'll try running something against a few to see.
And often having a homogenous database stack is a plus. If your production systems are all MySQL, then trying to get away with using MySQL for analytics too is a smart move etc.
I’ve seen so many tiddly data warehouses. Most companies don’t need web scale, and they overbuild and over complicate when they could be running on a simpler homogenous stack etc.
Cost is the most common reason I’ve seen. An RDS instance is about 1/2 the cost of Redshift per CPU and then Snowflake is slightly more expensive than Redshift (often worth the extra $$).
Also, if you’re dealing with less than 10GB of data the difference in performance will be barely noticeable, so at modest scale the most cost effective solution is RDS.
Because you don't want to learn and maintain a new kind of software in a small organisation with limiter resources, for example. Each new language, framework, database and other kind of tool adds a lot of cognitive load for everyone involved.
Customers who demand / are legally obliged to ensure their data does not leave their territory, is one big reason.
Snowflake give you some options, but if you get a big contract with a customer in another region your entire analytics platform is unavailable to that customer.