The Cloud Data Warehouse Conundrum

As companies like Snowflake have proven, there is strong demand for data warehouses that have been re-architected for the cloud. It’s tough to argue with these cloud data warehouses as  flexible and scalable places to store data. With their ease of use and elasticity, they can also appear cost-effective for traditional SQL use cases. 

However, while cloud data warehouses make it extraordinarily easy to onboard data into your system, as data volumes and query complexities increase, their elasticity and performance can actually translate into greater computing cost. The more data in the system, the more complex it becomes to query for users. As users increasingly attack the system to try and find the results they’re looking for, the concurrency demands on the system grows. 

At this point, the only lever you can pull to speed up query times and make users happy is to add more compute, which leads directly to higher monthly costs. The flexible data warehouse that you started off with is stretched by a user base that has too much data available to them. You’ve essentially ended up back at the status quo, with unhappy users and an unhappy budget holder, both competing for different things. 

By replicating the legacy data warehouse model for the cloud, you’re still storing and reporting on batch data after the fact, without the ability to solve today’s more relevant use cases such as streaming, visualization, graph, and machine learning. To obtain these capabilities with a cloud data warehouse requires even more parts, more compute, and more cost. 

In contrast, Kinetica was designed to perform complex analytics out-of-the-box without requiring additional computing costs. A cloud data warehouse might make sense when you don’t have an SLA, but Kinetica gives you built-in integrated analytics and the ability to act on your data quickly with high performance, low latency analysis. 

Interested in a more cost-effective solution for your data in the cloud? Join our December 2nd webinar, When Snowflakes Become A Snowstorm, where we’ll provide an alternative to the cloud data warehouse conundrum.

Andrew Wooler is global marketing manager at Kinetica.