>open source it may be. free it is not. paying an expert to correctly deploy an open source solution takes time and money. oh you want it maintained?
Funny. I heard this same kind of argument used against replacing oracle with postgres. It reminds me of Microsoft's "TCO" PR offensive back when they were public about how much they loathed open source competition.
Thing is that it wasnt just a straw man (nobody that needs to be convinced is under any illusions that software has to be maintained), Oracle was also way more expensive to maintain ON top of being expensive to run.
They had their hooks into that organization pretty good though and once that happens technology choices become highly political - which experts are you going to fire and which ones are you going to hire?
The oracle lot obviously didnt want it to be them that get managed out.
you’re calling it an organization, that alone typically indicates a larger scale, in which supporting something internal might be feasible. or at least it is a term used by those that have been there. you’re also referencing politics, which, again, that’s highly suggestive of a specific type of experience. experience within scale if not at scale.
please don’t mistake my intent to be that open source never makes sense. with the right plan and personnel, it can work better.
with the right scale and support, open source projects are started, though they aren’t always open from day one.
I think you are vastly under-estimating the amount of cost/manpower needed for snowflake and cloud based solutions (they are anything but turn-key and have a lot of churn). There are cases for both but it's not as simple as open source = hire and cloud = no people needed.
With Snowflake you are paying for not only the development of the product, the hosting of it, the engineers to run it, but also the sales, marketing, and management behind it. But on top of all that you probably need to hire people to implement and maintain a solution utilizing it for your organization.
> With Snowflake you are paying for not only the development of the product, the hosting of it, the engineers to run it, but also the sales, marketing, and management behind it.
and you can run the numbers to determine if the cost of ownership offsets headcount. what your dollar goes to isn’t part of that formula. only what your dollar gets you.
> But on top of all that you probably need to hire people to implement and maintain a solution utilizing it for your organization.
that is also a given. you would need at least as many people to implement analytics on top of the homebrew data warehouse, in addition to headcount to run the warehouse itself.
you seem to want to make this out to be vastly different spend amounts. it can be. sometimes it is, sometimes it is not, and the direction can vary.
We aren't talking about a homebrew data warehouse though, we are talking about open source software. Designing the schema and/or data flows on top of the warehouse is needed regardless of whether you use open source or Snowflake.
if it isn’t already running, yes, we are. open source is rarely if ever “off the shelf.”
if you’re suggesting vendor-hosted open source, that’s a consideration in vendor selection, and as much as it may seem obvious to suggest alternatives now, it wasn’t when they didn’t exist.
and yes, you correctly gathered the point on schemas and the like being the same everywhere.
Funny. I heard this same kind of argument used against replacing oracle with postgres. It reminds me of Microsoft's "TCO" PR offensive back when they were public about how much they loathed open source competition.
Thing is that it wasnt just a straw man (nobody that needs to be convinced is under any illusions that software has to be maintained), Oracle was also way more expensive to maintain ON top of being expensive to run.
They had their hooks into that organization pretty good though and once that happens technology choices become highly political - which experts are you going to fire and which ones are you going to hire?
The oracle lot obviously didnt want it to be them that get managed out.