Snowflake customers must choose between performance and flexibility

Snowflake (Nasdaq:SNOW) is boosting the performance of its standard data warehouses and introducing a new adaptive technology to help enterprises optimize compute costs — but customers will have to choose one or the other.

Adaptive Warehouses, built atop Snowflake’s Adaptive Compute, will lower the burden of compute resource management by maximizing efficiency through resource sizing and sharing, while the Gen 2 standard data warehouses will double analytics performance, the company said.

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Robert Kramer, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, sees advantages in Snowflake’s Adaptive Warehouses. “This eliminates the need for customers to guess warehouse sizes or manually configure concurrency settings. This simplifies Snowflake management and potentially reduces costs, especially for teams without dedicated cloud administrators,” he said. The new warehouses can consolidate analytics tasks into a shared pool that automatically balances usage, and this setup reduces idle compute and adapts to shifting demands, ensuring SLAs are met without constant oversight, he said.

The automated resource management capability of Adaptive Warehouses, which is still in private preview, could also enable enterprises looking to drive a variety of AI and advanced analytics use cases to experiment and deliver applications for those use cases faster.

The Adaptive Compute technology underlying Adaptive Warehouses is not new, and its use here is a sign of the company’s shift towards elastic and serverless infrastructure, a strategy that hyperscalers such as AWS, Google, and Microsoft have also used to strengthen their enterprise offerings.

It also helps Snowflake stay competitive with vendors like Databricks, which already support automatic scaling, Kramer said.

Managed compute offerings not suited for all workloads

There are some practical constraints on the use of serverless databases or data warehouses that enterprises should consider, said Matt Aslett, director of advisory firm ISG.

“If an enterprise needs control over physical hardware to meet specific performance requirements, then serverless is not an appropriate option. Additionally, long-running workloads may not deliver the advertised benefits in terms of cost-savings compared to ephemeral workloads,” Aslett said.

“Generally, serverless databases are best suited to development and test environments as well as lightweight applications and workloads with sporadic usage,” Aslett explained, adding that he expects Snowflake to provide customers with best practice guidelines as Adaptive Warehouses move from private preview to general availability.

Snowflake’s head of core platform division Artin Avanes said switching from a standard virtual warehouse to an Adaptive Warehouse is “as simple as running an alter command with no downtime required.”

Avanes said the rationale behind enabling customers to switch data warehouses is that Snowflake customers often say that consolidating workloads can be disruptive and time consuming, especially when warehouse names are hard coded into pipelines and scripts.

“With Adaptive Warehouses, users can simply convert their production workloads in batches, while still maintaining existing warehouse names, policies, permissions, and chargeback reporting structure,” he said.

Gen 2 generally available

For those not ready to switch, Snowflake has also made the Gen 2 update to its virtual standard data warehouse platform generally available.

Gen 2 has upgraded hardware and software to effect performance enhancements — “2.1x faster analytics”, said Avanes.

Comparing Adaptive Warehouses to Gen 2, Constellation Research principal analyst Michael Ni described Gen2 as a high-performance engine and Adaptive Compute as the autopilot.

“Gen2 delivers raw speed—2x faster analytics and up to 4x faster DML—but Adaptive Compute is about automation. While they’re separate today, Adaptive Compute is designed to run on the best available hardware, which likely includes Gen2,” Ni added.

However, Ni said, Snowflake customers currently have to choose a specific data warehouse — either Adaptive or Gen 2 — and the two functionalities cannot be combined.

“For now, customers get performance today and automation tomorrow,” he said.

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