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Comment by halotrope | Hacker News Reader

What is the best alternative for BigQuery? What is the most economical? Once you are hooked, it is really hard to imagine going to e.g Redshift

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Snowflake is easily the best alternative. It's a little expensive, but it just works.

I could never understand how to go about guesstimating what snowflake would cost, their pricing abstraction feels like lunacy as an outsider.

They're the Oracle of cloud databases.

Great product, pricing models are pretty insane.

And despite the pricing, they're still losing money!

That is because they figure out what you will pay and that is what they charge. It is completely disconnected from the costs involved.

Slowflake isn’t really an alternative if someone is switching due to costs. It’s generally more expensive for the same workloads.

Snowflake is much slower than BigQuery in my experience.

For which workload?

A little expensive is an understatement. It's black magic to figure out how much it's going to cost. Our test instance of snowflake costs 10x production BigQuery costs, which stores an order of magnitude more data and queries even more

Buy the biggest server on Hetzner and install ClickHouse (/s?)

There's also ClickHouse Cloud now.

Even better, there are lots of ClickHouse clouds! ClickHouse Cloud, Altinity.Cloud, DoubleCloud, Aiven, TinyBird...plus many others. This is the best assurance for users that prices for ClickHouse will stay competitive over time.

Disclaimer: I work at Altinity.

May be a slightly different use case but moving from BigQuery to managed Clickhouse on clickhouse.com has been pretty great. Easy data injection, super fast querying, lots of control over the environment, and a nice SQL console for quickly looking at the data.

Snowflake seems most similar, plus you would get to stay on GCP.

We at https://www.gumlet.com use bigquery a lot, but now it seems we will have to move to click house. Can’t trust google with anything. First Kubernetes price intro, then multi region storage price increase along with inter region price introduction and now this.

I would trust AWS but not Google.

Athena and Redshift Spectrum are the best alternatives on the AWS side.

Export your data via avro files and try using Athena

Ideally you’d used Parquet or ORC if querying from Athena/Trino/Presto. Since they are columnar formats you will enjoy considerably faster queues and lower query costs for most query patterns other than “select *…” since the query engine can just retrieve the columns needed for your query instead of the entire row.

100 percent correct.

Ideally you will also partition the data, so your queries can use partitions. Athena charges $5 per terabyte of data scanned, so it's important to get this right.

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