Comment by barrrrald
3 days ago
One thing I admire about Snowflake is a real commitment to self-cannibalization. They were super out front with Iceberg even though it could disrupt them, because that's what customers were asking for and they're willing to bet they'll figure out how to make money in that new world
Video of their SVP of Product talking about it here: https://youtu.be/PERZMGLhnF8?si=DjS_OgbNeDpvLA04&t=1195
Have you interacted with Snowflake teams much? We are using external iceberg tables with snowflake. Every interaction pretty much boils down to you really should not be using iceberg you should be using snowflake for storage. It's also pretty obvious some things are strategically not implemented to push you very strongly in that direction.
Not surprised - this stuff isn’t fully mature yet. But I interact with their team a lot and know they have a commitment to it (I’m the other guy in that video)
Out of curiosity - can you share a few examples of functionality currently not supported with Iceberg but that works well with their internal format?
even partition elimination is pretty primitive. For Query optimizer Iceberg is really not a primary target. The overall interaction with even technical people gives strong this is a sales org that happens to own an OLAP db product vibe.
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Supporting Iceberg is eventually having people leaving you because they have better elsewhere, but this is birectionnal, it means you can welcome people from Databricks because you have feature parity.