Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses

I agree that is a great approach - build around the main use cases and then make exceptions. I think a lot of companies have legitimate use cases for real-time analytics (outside of their internal decision making), but as you mention, preemptively optimize for the aspiration and leads them towards unnecessary tool and tech sprawl. For example, a marketplace application that shows you the quantity of an item currently available -- you as a consumer use that information to make a decision in seconds, so its a great use-case. Internally, the org probably uses that data for weekly or quarterly forecasting. I've seen use cases like that lead to the "let's make everything real-time", but not every use case benefits the same from real-time.

> they told me the new CDO was already convinced that said "RT-based" datalake was the way to go forward

Is the desire for "RT-based datalake" itself misplaced? Or just that the implementation isn't up to the job? Nobody _wants_ slow data, and reports that are usually fine with T+1 delay can become time critical (for example, a "what's selling?" report on black friday).

I work in a real time subscription analytics company (chartmogul.com). We fetch, normalize and aggregate various billing systems data and eventually visualize them into graphs and tables.

I had this discussion with key people and i would say it depends on multiple factors. Small companies really like and require real-time analytics: they want to see how a couple invoices translate into updated saas metrics or why they didn’t get a slack/email notification as soon asit happened. Larger ones will check their data less frequently per day or week, but again it depends on the people and their role. Most of them are happy with getting their data once per day into their mailboxes or warehouses.

But we try to make everyone happy so we aim for real time analytics.

From my experience (mostly startups), real time analytics is generally overkill, esp. from a BI perspective. Unless your business is very focused on real time data and transactional processing, you can generally get away with ETL/batch jobs. Show executives, product, and downstream teams some metrics that update a few times per day saves a ton of money over things like Snowflake/Databricks/Redshift stuff. While cloud services can be pricey, tools like dbt are really useful and can be administered by savvy business people or analyst types. Those candidates are way easier to hire compared to data engineers, sql experts, etc.

Real-time generally means near-real-time and even then I liken it to availability.

If asked people would say "I need to always be up" until they see the costs associated with it, then being out for a few hours a year tends to be ok.

I work as a web analyst (think Google Analytics).

One time I ran an A/B test on the color of a button. After the conclusion of the test, with a clear winner in hand, it took eleven months for all involved stakeholders to approve the change. The website in question got a few thousand visits a month and was not critical to any form of business.

This organization does not benefit from real-time analytics.

Now that's an extreme outlier, but my experience is that most organizations are in that position. The feedback loop from collecting data to making a decision is long, and real-time analytics shortens a part that's already not the bottleneck. The technical part of real-time analytics provides no value unless the org also has the operational capacity to use that data quickly.

I have seen this! I have, for example, seen a news site that looked at web analytics data from the morning and was able to publish new opinion pieces that afternoon if something was trending. They had a dedicated process built around that data pipeline. Critically, they had a specific idea of what they could do with that data when the received it.

So if you want a framework, I would start from a single, simple question: What can you actually do with real-time data? Name one (1) action your organization could take based on that data.

I think it's also useful to separate what data benefits from realtime and which users can make use of it. Even if you have real-time data, some consumers don't benefit from immediacy.

For me it mostly is that business people don't understand OLAP vs OLTP and that if they add 5 items to database and they are visible in the system their "dashboard" will not update instantly but only after when data pipes run.

Which is hard to explain because if it is not instant everywhere they think it is a bug and system is crappy. Later on they will use dashboard view once a week or once a month so 5 items update is not relevant at all.

The term "real-time" is much abused in marketing copy. It is often treated like a technical metric but it is actually a business metric: am I making operational decisions with the most recent data available? For many businesses, "most recent data available" can be several days old and little operational efficiency would be gained by investing in reducing that latency.

For some businesses, "real-time" can be properly defined as "within the last week". While there are many businesses where reducing that operational tempo to seconds would have an impact, it is by no means universal.

Just gonna keep linking this til the heat death of the universe: https://mcfunley.com/whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they-first-...

Real-time analytics are worse than useless. At best they are a distracting resource sink, at worst they directly harm the quality of decision-making.

> In this context-- the section in article where it says present data is of virtually zero importance to analytics is no longer true. We need a real solution even if we apply those (presumably complex and costly) solutions to only the most deserving use cases (and not abuse them).

Totally agreed, though where real-time data is being put through an analytics lens is where CDW's start to creak and get costly. In my experience, these real-time uses shift the burden from being about human-decision-makers to automated decision-making and it becomes more a part of the product. And that's cool, but it gets costly, fast.

It also makes perfect sense to fake-it-til-you-make-it for real-time use cases on an existing Cloud Data Warehouse/dbt style _modern data stack_ if your data team's already using it for the rest of their data platform; after all they already know it and it's allowed that team to scale.

But a huge part of the challenge is that once you've made it, the alternative for a data-intensive use case is a bespoke microservice or a streaming pipeline, often in a language or on a platform that's foreign to the existing data team who's built the thing. If most of your code is dbt sql and airflow jobs, working with Kafka and streaming spark is pretty foreign (not to mention entirely outside of the observability infrastructure your team already has in place). Now we've got rewrites across languages/platforms, and leave teams with the cognitive overhead of multiple architectures & toolchains (and split focus). The alternative would be having a separate team to hand off real-time systems to and only that's if the company can afford to have that many engineers. Might as well just allocate that spend to your cloud budget and let the existing data team run up a crazy bill on Snowflake or BigQuery as long as it's less than the cost of a new engineering team.

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There's something incredible about the ruthless efficiency of sql data platforms that allows data teams to scale the number of components/engineer. Once you have a Modern-Data-Stack system in place, the marginal cost of new pipelines or transformations is negligible (and they build atop one another). That platform-enabled compounding effect doesn't really occur with data-intensive microservices/streaming pipelines and means only the biggest business-critical applications (or skunk works shadow projects) will get the data-intensive applications[1] treatment, and business stakeholders will be hesitant to greenlight it.

I think Materialize is trying to build that Modern-Data-Stack type platform for real-time use cases: one that doesn't come with the cognitive cost of a completely separate architecture or the divide of completely separate teams and tools. If I already had a go-to system in place for streaming data that could be prototyped with the data warehouse, then shifted over to a streaming platform, the same teams could manage it and we'd actually get that cumulative compounding effect. Not to mention it becomes a lot easier to then justify using a real-time application the next time.

[1]: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2014/10/16/real-time-data-produ...

Disclaimer - Snowflake here.

I will just point out that when my team and I talk about streaming, we are focused on not real-time because in many cases, the value to a customer is not there. Not every "streaming" use case is fraud detection. In fact, we have been saying for awhile that for many streaming use cases, the value is 60 seconds < [value here] < 60 minutes.

Example: (and yes, this is a Snowflake video but has a visual) https://youtu.be/Ou04UZWwxgg?t=64

Real-time analytics for human is not that useful. Human can't make decisions and take actions in minutes anyway, let alone seconds. A notable exception can be log analytics for operations, but I'd argue in that case throughput is more more important than a few seconds of latency. Case in point, CloudWatch Insights can consistently drive about 1GB/s of log scan. It's good enough for log search in practice.

On the other hand, real-time analytics for machines can be critical to a business, which is why Yandex built Clickhouse and ByteDance deployed more than 20K nodes of Clickhouse.

Just like using any technology, we need to figure out what problems we solve for real-time analytics first.

The way I think about this is a typical up and to the right graph, of cost vs Speed. As you increase the speed, you increase the cost. So for real-time to be benefical to your business, you need to have be able to make more profit with data that is 1 second fresh vs 1 minute delayed. Looking at it like this, you can roughly group them: 50 milliseconds, 1 second, 1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day. In which area is your business for making profit? Uber showing a taxi location = 1 minute (perhaps fake it moving in between). Large electricity substation monitoring = 1 minute - assuming power down takes 5 minutes to commence. Trading with user interaction = 50ms. Then at each of those points are technology systems for deliverying that speed. I guess what some of these vendors are trying to do is change the shape of the graph. If they can bring the cost down massively, then more it may be worth Uber showing a 1 second update :) I know some users that watch the litle car obsessively.

Conveniently leave out the issue of cost. Snowflake is piling on features that encourage more compute. Customers abuse the system and they (Snowflake) respond by helping cement them into continuing the abuse (spending more) by developing features to make bad habits and horrible engineering decisions look like something they should be doing. Typical.

I assume they're angling for a salesforce acquisition as they move towards being a micro-hosting service like salesforce.

I've noticed that too. I think the marketing is definitely working, I'm seeing a few organisations starting to shift more and more workloads onto them, and some are also publishing datasets on their marketplace.

One of their most interesting offerings coming up is Snowpark which lets you run a Python function as a UDF, within Snowflake. This way you don't have to transfer data around everywhere, just run it as part of your normal SQL statements. It's also possible to pickle a function and send it over... so conceivably one could train a data science model and run that as part of a SQL statement. This could get very interesting.

Disclaimer: I work at SingleStoreDB.

Building a database that can handle both analytics and operations is what we've been working on for the past 10+ years. Our customers use us to build applications with a strong analytical component to them (all of the use cases you mentioned and many more).

How's it going? It's going really well! And we're working on some really cool things that will expand our offering from being a pure data storage solution to much more of a platform[1].

If you want to learn more about our architecture, we published this paper at SIGMOD in late 2022 about it[2].

[1]: https://davidgomes.com/databases-cant-be-just-databases-anym...

[2]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3514221.3526055

Yeah, they're providing a path-of-least-resistance for getting stuff done in your existing data environment.

A common challenge in a lot of organizations is IT as a roadblock to deployment of internal tools coming from data teams. Snowflake is answering this with Streamlit. You get an easy platform for data people to use and deploy on and it can all be done within the business firewall under data governance within Snowflake.

After a series of calls, examples and explanations with them we never managed to get close to a reasonable projection of what our monthly costs would be like on Snowflake. I understand why companies in this field use abstract notions of 'processing' /'compute' units but it's a no go finance wise.

Without some close to real world projections we don't have time to consider implementation to find out for ourselves.

Snowflake is capturing a large market share in analytics industries thanks to its “just works” feature. I’m a massive fan.

But in the end, snowflake stores the data in S3 as partitions. If you want to update a single value you have to replace the entire s3 partition. Similarly you need to read a reasonable amount of s3 data to retrieve even a single record. Thus you’re never going to get responses shorter than half a second (at best). As long as you don’t try and game around that limitation it works great.

Materialize up here also follows the same model in the end FWIW.

It's really bad for in-product analytics. Slow and expensive to keep running on a 24/7 SLA.

Even with Vertica doing that, we're seeing 10x costs just doing back-office DWH. My job now is keeping Vertica running so we can pay our Snowflake bill.

I agree. The cloud providers are basically the guys who sell shovels in gold rush. Snowflake still needs to build on top the clouds so MAG never lose. I heard that SNOW is offering its own cloud services but I could be wrong -- and even if I'm correct they have a super long way to catch up.

What I heard is that AWS got there first with Redshift but then didn’t really invest as much as was required by users so Snowflake found an opening and pounced on it.

BigQuery in GCP is a pretty great alternative and I know that GCP invests/promotes it heavily, but they were slightly late to the market.

> 1. SNOW's market cap is $50B. GOOGL, MSFT, AMZN are all over $1T. Owning Snowflake would be a drop in the bucket for any of them (let alone if they were splitting the revenue).

FAANG can't utilize their market cap to buy SNOW, they would need to pay cash, and 50B is very large amount for any of these companies (its about annual Google net income).

Also, snow stock is very inflated now, it is heavily income negative, and revenue not that high, stock price is very high on growth expectations.

Yeah ClickHouse is definitely the way to go here. Its ability to serve queries with low latency and high concurrency is in an entirely different league from Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, etc.

For real-time and large historical data, open source there's tdengine/questdb, commercial DolphinDB and kdb+. If you only need fast recent data and not large historical embedding is a good solution which means h2/duckdb/sqlite if open source, extremedb if commercial. I've benchmarked and ran applications on most these databases including running real-time analytics.

Why does bolding words imply adtech?