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Comment by apwell23 | Hacker News Reader

> " every database vendor will be forced by the market to optimise for performance such that they tend towards the performance of natively ingested data."

This assumes that their internal storage format has nothing to do with decades of engineering infrastructure that they built their business model around and that they would simply give all that up and compete based on just their compute layer. snowflake might as well shutup shop and return billions to the investors. Locking in data into their ecosystem is their whole business model.

Is there as good example of open standard forcing companies to give up their proprietary tech ?

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That's the natural evolution of most tech markets. When the tech is young, proprietary companies dominate because they can control the customer experience better and deliver functionality that is simply too complex for open solutions. As the technology matures, customers start demanding interoperability, reliability, better prices, and eventually some employees "defect" from one of the big companies and start the open standards that replace their ex-employer, or an outsider reads a paper and re-implements the technology from scratch.

> Is there as good example of open standard forcing companies to give up their proprietary tech ?

UNIX -> Linux, BSD

Oracle/Sybase -> MySQL/PostgresQL

Symbolics/Lucid -> Common Lisp

Altair/Apple/Commodore/Atari -> IBM PC & clones

VMWare -> QEMU

Basically every tech that Google pioneered and then missed out on commercializing. Protobufs -> Avro/Parquet, MapReduce -> Hadoop, Flume -> Spark, Chubby -> Zookeeper, Borg -> Kubernetes, etc.

I’ll just point out on the Snowflake side, we’ve been very public saying we want Iceberg/Parquet to be at or as close to parity as possible with our native format. The value add is the platform, not lock in. That also forces us to be the best on open formats, which IMO is also a good thing for everyone.

Disclaimer: I work at Snowflake literally on this with my team. :)

> we’ve been very public saying we want Iceberg/Parquet to be at or as close to parity as possible with our native format

Thats great to hear. Would this mean that external iceberg tables would have the same performance as native table ? My impression of parent comment was that, eventually there would be no such thing as 'native format'. Really interested to see public statements by snowflake to that effect, would love to share that with my team.

> snowflake might as well shutup shop and return billions to the investors.

I mean, we can dream right?

There’s a bunch of companies that I don’t believe deserve their status or valuation and Snowflake is one of them.

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