great discussion on snowflake today https://www.reddit.com/r/dataengineering/comments/xex3f5/what_makes_snowflake_different/

Do you think that snowflake will ever compete with clickhouse, imply, or Rockset?

Well, everything is a tradeoff from that perspective. More or less all these are OLAPs, the amount of data that gets scanned for any query even after partition is going to decide the performance. For example, Rockset uses converged index, so it takes a trade off of write speed to literally do all kinds of indexes on all columns where as Firebolt is allowing index creation on F3 file format to ensure we scan little. So yes, it will be a matter of time Snowflake is going to introduce Sparse index or Join index, because the pressure of High concurrency and Low latency or so called user facing analytics is going to hit them soon enough. Similar to how they had to bring in Unistore to stay in the HTAP competition. Hope this helps 🙂