Great article. On the surface, it's about Snowflake. At a deeper level, the article is about the perverse incentives motivating SaaS businesses to do seemingly dumb, inefficient things and avoid seemingly obvious optimizations by default.
Many SaaS businesses are perfectly happy to let customers shoot themselves in the foot if it generates more revenue. The BigQuery example (presently, by default, `select * from table limit 10` obediently scans the entire table at your expense!) is spot-on.
As the article so well puts it, every SaaS company has a vested financial interest "to leave optimization gremlins in."
Many SaaS businesses are perfectly happy to let customers shoot themselves in the foot if it generates more revenue. The BigQuery example (presently, by default, `select * from table limit 10` obediently scans the entire table at your expense!) is spot-on.
As the article so well puts it, every SaaS company has a vested financial interest "to leave optimization gremlins in."