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miked98

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CEO/Founder at Rill. I ♥ Big Data, analytics, and visualization.

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In our experience, the primary driver of Snowflake costs is not the compute for aggregation, but the compute required for lots of reads/scans.

We recently built a Snowflake-to-ClickHouse pipeline for a customer where aggregates are built hourly in Snowflake, then pushed into a ClickHouse table to power their user-facing dashboards.

By offloading dashboard queries to ClickHouse, they slashed their Snowflake bill by ~25%, which was worth millions to them.

(Admittedly, running aggregations elsewhere—for example, in Spark—could further reduce costs, but you would then need Iceberg to make the tables queryable in Snowflake.)

D3.js powers all of the visualizations at Metamarkets, thanks to Vadim Ogievetsky, who got an early look at the D3 code base. It's a powerful framework that extends beyond visualizations: it can be used to attach data to any part of the DOM, not just SVG elements.

Here's one example that weaves together both data and graphics: http://labs.metamx.com/.