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Comment by krasznahorkai | Hacker News Reader

I work as a solution architect at a consulting firm that builds analytical data platforms for customers. Our company has a partnership with Snowflake, which means all the solutions we build are pushed to use Snowflake. Their sales strategy is very Oracle-like and at least in my circles many Snowflake sales employees are ex-Oracle. This means our sales and Snowflake sales are the best of friends. Formally they'll deny kickbacks, but who knows?

For all my clients Snowflake is overkill when you look from the perspective of growth and scale. They'll never use that part of Snowflake. They might just do as well with DuckDB, Azure Synapse or any other analytical-oriented platform laying around.

What I do like with less-than-big use-cases is that (at least at Snowflake) you pay relatively little if you do relatively little data processing. It's not free, but it doesn't break the bank either.

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> and at least in my circles many Snowflake sales employees are ex-Oracle.

given my previous experiences with Snowflake sales, this would not surprise me in the slightest. A small list of the incredibly pushy things SF sales teams did:

- called up junior team members and pushed them to sign a renewal deal - point blank refused to explain how credits translated to real world money when pressed about how much usage we were actually getting for our money - after being told not to, they continued to call team members and pressured them to commit to a renewal - TAC/support gave consistently vague and unhelpful explanations.

So yeah, Snowflake is an awful company and an overpriced product, and I hope it fails.

sorry, but, there’s something about this that doesn’t smell right.

junior ic being asked to sign a contract makes zero sense. that’s insanity. plenty of managers at plenty of companies lack that level of authority.

sales teams use slimy tactics. that’s a given. time limits, multi-years, etc, etc, etc. trying to get the wrong person to sign is a different category entirely.

maybe you ran across the “best of the best” sales people there, but, this sounds sufficiently outlandish that i have to question it a bit.

"Snowflake Inc. was founded in July 2012...by three data warehousing experts: Benoît Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski. Dageville and Cruanes previously worked as data architects at Oracle Corporation... "

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_Inc.#History

The heart of Snowflake is a very solid data warehouse, and one with very few configuration options.

Yes there other bells and whistles, but it doesn’t feel as though you are buying something hugely overblown even if you are doing something very vanilla.

And as you say, it’s all consumption based pricing so I think it’s unfair to characterise their sales team as pushing the wrong solution into the market.

> you pay relatively little if you do relatively little data processing

Yep, surprised how few people have been mentioning this here.

Compared with running a managed postgres instance 100% of the time, running a snowflake xs warehouse for a few minutes a day can be significantly cheaper.

The reason is that Snowflake charges close to cost for object storage and they compress your data when they put it in.

However...that means they need to make it up elsewhere. When you do get around to running queries the markup on compute can be 5-10x (or potentially more) depending on the plan you are using. If you do constant, compute heavy aggregation Snowflake is not the right place to do it.

Yes, but my point is, lots of small businesses come out ahead on this.

Which is totally by design! Their whole model is that once it is no longer cost effective, it isn't worth the switching costs to leave. (Exactly like the AWS model, un-coincidentally.)

But I think lots of commenters here (at least at the time I wrote my original comment) seem to be missing that this isn't nefarious or anything, it's win-win for a lot of businesses.

If you want something fresh and new in this space, check out FeatureBase: https://featurebase.com/. We just added vector/embeddings support to the cloud product.

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