It costs a million dollars to run a service that essentially “uploads a 2KB CSV to a database” on Snowflake?
And you can cut this in half by changing some defaults in instance lifetime?
I’m starting to understand why Snowflake’s market cap is something like $50B. This sounds like a nice money-printing business if you can convince enterprises to use it.
I should clarify, the cost was coming from computers that engineers used to write queries against our database - the 2KB CSV was just how we managed their permissions, and the cost of that was negligible.
The immense cost was coming from someone writing a query that translates to "I need one row of data" and then we get billed like $10-20 in idling compute. With multiple computers and several full-time SQL modellers, it adds up very, very quickly.
As the guy that just has to keep Snowflake running smoothly and isn't paying for it, it's a really nice product. I would still prefer something else on principle because it isn't open source, but eh, I guess it reduces my stress at work.
And you can cut this in half by changing some defaults in instance lifetime?
I’m starting to understand why Snowflake’s market cap is something like $50B. This sounds like a nice money-printing business if you can convince enterprises to use it.