I spent the past year puzzling over the DB market as well, but I don't feel like I'm much closer to …

I spent the past year puzzling over the DB market as well, but I don't feel like I'm much closer to understanding it. It appears that a lot of attention is now directed at the folks doing 100 MB queries, and the high end has moved past everybody's radar. My idea of an exciting product is Ocient, who have skipped over Cloud and gone for hyperscale on-prem hardware. Yellowbrick is also a contender here. I have a lot of experience with Vertica, and they seem to have gotten stuck in this niche as well, with sales tilted towards big accounts, but less traction in smaller shops, and a difficult road to get a SaaS or similar easy-start offering. There's a crossover point where self-managed is cheaper than cloud, but nobody seems to have any idea where it is. Snowflake will gladly tell you that your sub-$1M Vertica cluster should be replaced by $10M of sluggish SaaS, and that you are saving money by doing so. These decisions seem more in the realm of psychology or political science. …