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Comment by iknownothow | Hacker News Reader

Any typical analytics use case, where a single dataset (think a single table) is less than 2TB and the total data size is less than 10-20 TB in the organization. If that's you, you very likely don't need Snowflake and definitely not Databricks. An RDBMS would suffice, I recommend Postgres.

These sizes are just my thumb rules. Your mileage may vary.

I have people in my network use Snowflake with a total data size of 50GB!!! It makes my blood boil.

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years ago, had this one college professor, students would spend the time before class asking him to divide two fractional numbers, and he would rattle off a few decimal places after calculating, to cheers from the students that had their calculators out with the answers. the excitement would build with every correct decimal point.

he didn’t actually need a calculator.

but he did own one.

hopefully this does not cause your blood to go through a state change.

Am I right in understanding that all these companies are actually making deals for on-demand use in the future?

you can get started with many of these companies with just a credit card with monthly billing. just like the major cloud vendors.

> I have people in my network use Snowflake with a total data size of 50GB!!! It makes my blood boil.

I keep a whole bunch of small-ish datasets in Snowflake because it means I don't have to do all the work to janitor my own postgres install. I go with the db someone else maintains for me that I have, not the one that I wish I had.

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