Their Pitch
Production grade infrastructure for modern analytics.
Our Take
It's a turbocharged data warehouse that promises sub-second queries on petabytes of data. Think of it as the Formula 1 car of databases — ridiculously fast but you need the budget and team to handle it.
Deep Dive & Reality Check
Used For
- +**Your Snowflake queries take 10 minutes and your CEO is tapping their foot** → Sub-second results on the same petabyte datasets, meetings actually start on time
- +**You're processing 168 billion rows daily and your current setup is having a breakdown** → Handles massive scale without the 3am alert calls
- +**Your BI dashboard crashes when more than 20 people look at it** → Supports hundreds of concurrent users without breaking a sweat
- +**Moving data between systems takes forever and breaks constantly** → Ingests massive files quickly and actually handles updates and deletes
- +Separates storage from compute power — scale up processing without touching your data or paying for storage you don't need
Best For
- >Your current data warehouse takes coffee breaks longer than your attention span
- >Processing billions of rows daily and Snowflake is starting to crack under pressure
- >You need 100+ people running reports simultaneously without everything grinding to a halt
Not For
- -Small teams under 50 people or startups with under 1TB of data — you're paying Ferrari prices to drive to the grocery store
- -Anyone wanting simple setup and maintenance — this needs dedicated data engineers who know what they're doing
- -Companies that need full control over their infrastructure — it's managed service or nothing
Pairs With
- *AWS S3 (where your actual data lives since Firebolt just processes it)
- *PostgreSQL (your transactional database that feeds data into Firebolt for analytics)
- *dbt (for transforming data before Firebolt crunches the numbers)
- *Apache Airflow (to orchestrate your data pipelines and keep everything moving)
- *Tableau (where executives want their pretty dashboards after Firebolt does the heavy lifting)
- *Snowflake (what you're probably trying to replace because it's too slow)
- *Slack (where your data team celebrates when queries finally run in under a second)
The Catch
- !No public pricing means you're going in blind until the sales demo (and it's probably expensive)
- !You can't easily export data back to S3 like you can with Snowflake — requires manual API work
- !The faster data ingestion gets pricey — bigger files need bigger engines which means bigger bills
Bottom Line
Built for companies drowning in data who can't wait 20 minutes for a simple query to finish.