[thejosh]

Sounds great until you're locked into Snowflake - so glad iceberg is becoming the standard, anything is great.

The trap you end up in is you have to pay snowflake to access your data, iceberg and other technology help with the walled garden.

Not just snowflake, any pay on use provider.

(Context - have spent 5+ years working with Snowflake, it's great, have built drivers for various languages, etc).

[gigatexal]

Locked in? I mean they’re your partner. As long as you’re deriving value from them the partnership is still valuable no?

[thejosh]

Everytime you want to query your data, you need to pay the compute cost.

If instead you can write to something like Parquet/Iceberg, you're not paying for access your data.

Snowflake is great at aggregations and other stuff (seriously, huge fan of snowflakes SQL capabilities), but let's say you have a visualisation tool, you're paying for pulling data out .

Instead, writing data to something like S3, you instead can hookup your tools to this.

It's expensive to pull data out of Snowflake otherwise.

[kortilla]

Yes, don’t be obtuse. “Vendor lock-in” is not some foreign unheard of concept.

[nojvek]

Not all vendors are same. Snowflake charges an arm and leg for compute.

It’s 36x more expensive than equivalent EC2 compute.

[kdazzle]

Snowflake is expensive, even compared to Databricks, and you pay their pre-AWS discount storage price while they get the discount and pocket the difference as profit