The end-to-end cost-performance of real-time analytics: Snowflake vs. ClickHouse Cloud

CostBench is a benchmarking tool designed to evaluate the cost-performance of real-time analytics systems by measuring the entire analytics path, from data ingestion to query execution. Unlike traditional benchmarks that focus on static datasets, CostBench assesses the continuous ingest, data maintenance, and query serving processes, highlighting how systems handle fresh data and maintain query readiness. The benchmark was applied to compare Snowflake and ClickHouse Cloud, revealing that ClickHouse outperformed Snowflake significantly in terms of cost-efficiency and query latency. ClickHouse maintains a continuous freshness model with its incremental materialized views, keeping pre-aggregations in sync with raw data, thereby supporting sub-minute decisioning workloads more effectively. Snowflake's Interactive Tables improved query performance compared to its standard materialized views, but the overall cost and complexity of maintaining freshness with Snowflake remained higher. This comprehensive approach underscores the importance of evaluating real-time analytics systems based on their ability to manage and serve continuously changing data efficiently.