> It's a terrible article. The author misunderstands competition and how much it drives products in this area.
Agree, but the author has one thing right. Snowflake is not transparent about product behavior, which makes it hard to reason about costs and performance.
Open source data warehouses like ClickHouse and Druid don't have this problem. If you want to know how something works, you can look at the code. Or listen to talks from the committers. This transparency is an enduring strength of open source projects.
I'm not complaining, of course. It's just an observation. Snowflake is very similar to Oracle in that respect, which is not surprising given where the founders came from.
Personally I think Snowflake is very impressive on the things they optimize for, which includes complex queries on enterprise data sources. The same could be said for BigQuery.
Agree, but the author has one thing right. Snowflake is not transparent about product behavior, which makes it hard to reason about costs and performance.
Open source data warehouses like ClickHouse and Druid don't have this problem. If you want to know how something works, you can look at the code. Or listen to talks from the committers. This transparency is an enduring strength of open source projects.