Taking Control of Your Snowflake Costs

The Pros and Cons of Italian Sports Cars

Ferrari and Lamborghini sports cars are some of the most impressive automobiles in the world. Sleek, fast, exclusive, and extremely fun to drive, what’s not to love?

Well, it is hard to love all those high costs, for example:

• First, they have an extremely high price; base models start at over $200,000, and it’s possible to pay several times more.

• Second, not known for reliability, their parts are more expensive than cars with higher production volumes, as are labor costs due to the specialized technicians required.

• Third, their powerful engines guzzle expensive gas, lots more if you like to drive fast.

• And their insurance costs are out of sight. Fortunately, you only pay that big bill twice a year.

They are a great choice if you love Italian sports cars and can afford the high costs. But most people cannot afford those extra expenses and opt for a more reliable and cost-effective Toyota or Chevrolet.

Is Snowflake Your Italian Sports Car?

You certainly can relate to Italian sports car owners if you are a Snowflake user.

• On the plus side, your Snowflake is fun to use and easy to scale, so much better than your historical data warehousing environment.

• It can be highly performant—zero to sixty in no time. And it has a short stopping distance when you don’t need all that computing power.

• Further, it neatly packages many essential functions, such as security and availability, improving your driving experience.

• And it supports a broad range of workloads and applications, essentially letting you drive any road.

On the Other Hand, There’s All the Spending

Like an Italian sports car owner, as a Snowflake user, you enjoy all the positives and live with Snowflake’s high costs.

What are these high costs?

• You must pay-as-you-go for the Snowflake with all the computing and storage resources you require to get the high performance you seek. These usage-based costs can add up quickly.

• And like every organization, your workload can vary dramatically by hour, day, week, etc. Usage-based pricing combined with varying workloads is a recipe for unpredictable Snowflake bills.

These high, unpredictable Snowflake bills inevitably lead to issues such as:

• You constantly overspend your anticipated Snowflake credits and must scramble to obtain more.

• Your Finance team requests you tame your Snowflake bill, but you need help complying.

• Your user departments complain about their Snowflake charge-back allocations and, as a result, reduce their investments in other projects and innovation.

• And the time you spend trying to get your Snowflake costs under control means you have less time to do other valuable things.

Optimize Your Warehouse To Control Snowflake Costs

But you don’t have to live with your high Snowflake costs. That is if you use an AI-driven warehouse optimization solution alongside Snowflake.

These innovative cloud warehouse optimization solutions automatically uncover savings opportunities without impacting performance, learning and adjusting to real-time workload changes by controlling warehouse size, clustering, and memory.

With warehouse optimization, Snowflake credits usage typically drops by 30% while holding performance constant. That’s like getting a Ferrari at the price of a Toyota. A pretty good deal, right?

To better understand warehouse optimization, I found this e-book, Keebo’s Complete Guide to Optimizing Snowflake’s Cost and Query Performance, very informative. Enjoy the drive.