Snowflake's Instacart protestations hint at challenges for poster child of the data cloud

Snowflake should have been enjoying positive results at the end of last month. Revenue for the second for the quarter was $674.0 million, a 36 percent leap on the same period last year, albeit with an operating loss of $285.4 million, up from $207.7 million on Q2 2022. But financial news from elsewhere emerged to spoil the …

[BigAndos]

I’ve used snowflake in my last two jobs. There are a lot of things I love about the product, but cost management has always been a black art (perhaps deliberately). It is very difficult to allocate a cost to a specific workload unless you have a dedicated virtual warehouse per workload but this can quickly become inefficient if you have a lot of activity.

Snowflake’s built in cost management tools are pretty poor and most customers end up having to build their own from my observation. Something they need to improve on.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Too busy serving their shareholders to serve their customers...

[Cris E]

The tools AWS and Google provide for cost tracking and control are primitive as well. Hardly a surprise, but customers who need closer financial predictability are not amused. We're on GCP and we just bought a company with a lot of AWS, but there are few good ways to drill into sudden spikes in costs. We've actually started opening support tickets to get them to eat the cost of diagnosing some of these. At least Google is promising improved cost dashboards "soon".

[Killfalcon]

"Data Lakehouse"

What on earth does that mean?

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

I think it's marketing speak for "all your data is on our cloud service, pay us money or we delete it"

[Anonymous Coward]

Deletes cost money too!

[JamesMcP]

"Data Lakes" are generally piles of files, usually something like JSON or parquet, and are pretty raw. A "Warehouse" is a big database of sanitized and "blessed" data. Typically you use two different sets of tools/apps to access these.

A "Data Lake House" is a single portal to both kinds of data. I.e. queries can hit the files and the tables at the time.

[Alistair]

Data Lakehouse?

So the data is out at the lakehouse, enjoying a cold one on the dock while fishing up a ...... profitfish?

<hides under the desk>