Ankur Goyal: preference

Transcript context

…This is Nikita Shamgunov, the actual original founder. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, now he's doing the opposite. He's built the world's best free tier and is building hyper-inexpensive Postgres. But because the number of people that can use SingleStore is smaller than the number of people that can use free Postgres, yet the amount that they're willing to pay for that use case is higher, SingleStore is packaged in a way that just makes it harder to use. I know I'm not directly answering your question, but for me, that was one of those sort of utopian things. It's the technology analog to, if two people love each other, why can't they be together? SingleStore, in many ways, is the best database technology, and it's the best in a number of ways. But it's just really hard to use. I think Snowflake is going through that right now as well. As someone who works in observability, I dearly miss the variant type that I used to use in Snowflake. It is, without any question, at least in my experience, the best implementation of semi-structured data and sort of solves the problem of storing it very, very efficiently and querying it efficiently, almost as efficiently as if you specified the schema exactly, but giving you total flexibility. So it's just a marvel of engineering, but it's packaged behind Snowflake, which means that the minimum query time is quite high. I have to have a Snowflake enterprise license, right? I can't deploy it on a laptop, I can't deploy it in a customer's premises, or whatever. So you're sort of constrained to the packaging by which one can interface with Snowflake in the first place. And I think every observability product in some sort of platonic ideal would be built on top of Snowflake's variant implementation and have better performance, it would be cheaper, the customer experience would be better. But alas, it's just not economically feasible right now for that to be the case. Do you buy what Honeycomb says about needing to build their own super wide column store?…

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