Two years after announcing a database that can do analytics and transactions in the same system, Snowflake has yet to commercially launch Unistore, its CFO admitted.

Blaming the difficulty of getting the cost of developing and running the product in line with commercial reality, Michael Scarpelli told the Goldman Sachs Commununacopia + Technology Conference last week that the cloud analytics and data platform company would be making the product generally available "very soon."

At its own conference in the summer of 2022, Snowflake launched Unistore in private preview as a row-based storage engine to support analytics on transactional data.

At the time, the company said users would be able to build data pipelines to stream data from transactional systems into Snowflake or build transactional applications themselves within the platform.

The goal was to create "a data pipeline to pull all that data into Snowflake [and then] everything's in Snowflake and it's easy to manage. [It] reduces or entirely removes the complexity of managing your transactional data," said Carl Perry, director of product management at Snowflake in 2022.

But at the Goldman Sachs gathering, Scarpelli said he did not see users migrating data from their Snowflake data warehouse systems to Unistore. "It's more for net new workloads that are transactional in nature but have heavy data volumes and querying that's needed in that data," he said.

The system is in public preview, and he mentioned that Snowflake was about to "go GA" (general availability) with the product. He said the delay in the commercial launch was due to the struggle to get the costs right.

"They've had targets, and they've been working on cost structure to get it so that it was going to be margin positive."

Another cause was the sheer technical challenge. "One of the reasons it has taken so long is no one has ever done this before... it was not easy from a technical standpoint," he said.

Database experts may be forgiven for a collective eye-roll at this point. We have been here before.

In 2019, database company SingleStore announced support for both transactional and analytics workloads on a single data store called Universal Storage. It was awarded a US patent in July 2021.

When Snowflake announced its Unistore, SingleStore complained that Snowflake seemed to be following its approach.

As The Register previously reported, multiple database vendors have attempted to tackle the same problem, including Oracle with its Heatwave product, and SAP with its in-memory database HANA. Vendors with a background in transactional systems have built analytics functions on top of their databases, including MongoDB.

When Snowflake announced Unistore, Andy Pavlo, associate professor of databaseology at Carnegie Mellon University, pointed out that it was similar to Vertica's write-optimized storage (WOS), which has been available since the late 2000s, while Google's new Napa DBMS from 2021 is doing something similar. Notable academic implementations of the idea also include TUM's HyPer from 2015 and Saarland's OctopusDB from 2010. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/09/16/snowflake_unistore_delay/