How Entain achieved 35% Snowflake savings by empowering teams with better cost management tooling

MySQL limitations forced migration to scalable cloud infrastructure

Entain's data analytics team managed everything downstream from their betting engine, initially running on MySQL infrastructure that couldn't scale with their growing needs. The team needed cloud infrastructure that could scale instantly and eliminate the risk of multi-day outages that crippled their analytical capabilities.

Snowflake solved their immediate scalability problems, supporting 900 registered users with approximately 100-150 heavy users across data engineers, analysts, automation engineers, data science, trading technology, and marketing technology teams.

However, the migration's tight deadlines led to suboptimal implementations that would later drive unexpected cost increases.

Homegrown cost monitoring hit usability limits as complexity grew

Before SELECT, Entain built internal cost monitoring through Power BI reports that grouped Snowflake users into logical business domains. The solution queried account usage schemas and applied arbitrary credit cost values to provide high-level spending visibility across teams. While this approach worked for basic pulse checks, it had significant limitations for actual optimization work.

The Power BI solution lacked alerts, budgets, and the granular insights needed for optimization. Teams could see that Data Science was spending a certain amount, but couldn't drill down to understand which specific jobs or queries were driving costs.

Additional technical limitations made the system frustrating to use: UTC timezone delays meant previous day costs weren't visible until 11am, and Snowsight couldn't render more than 2-3 days of data due to too many data points.

Cost explosion triggered urgent need for better visibility

The situation became critical when Entain found themselves 450% over their annual Snowflake commitment after adding new workloads onto Snowflake.

This cost explosion made SELECT adoption an urgent priority for gaining immediate visibility and control over spending.

The team found SELECT's proof of concept "so easy" compared to their previous solutions, providing exactly what they felt the Snowflake platform should offer out of the box.

SELECT enabled 35% cost savings through systematic optimization

Within two months of adopting SELECT, Entain achieved a 35% reduction in total annual Snowflake costs while actually adding more business workloads to the platform.

This dramatic cost reduction came through multiple targeted optimizations that SELECT made immediately visible and actionable.

The first major win came from database storage optimization, where SELECT instantly highlighted a database costing $60K/year in backup costs.

Gen2 warehouse optimization delivered massive pipeline savings

SELECT's insights also enabled Entain to optimize their data ingestion infrastructure. The team switched to Gen2 warehouses for their high-frequency merge operations, running 950 Kafka topics across two Gen2 extra small warehouses.

This optimization reduced their ingestion costs from 300 credits per day to 80 credits per day - approximately $200K/year in savings. The team now merges every 20 minutes across 900 tables with no queuing issues.

Micro partition insights revealed expensive scanning patterns

SELECT's micro partition insights identified costly full table scans in their Martech operations, where jobs were scanning entire databases every 1-2 hours.

One specific job costing $60K/year was adding only a handful of records daily. By simply adding date filters to look at only the last 24 hours instead of full table scans, the team reduced that job's cost from $60K to $10K annually.

SELECT replaced all Snowflake cost management workflows

SELECT transformed how Entain manages Snowflake costs, becoming their single source of truth for all cost monitoring and optimization activities.

The team now uses daily Slack digests to track long-running queries, largest increased workloads, and new workflows. Blake conducts weekly reviews with each department to discuss cost changes and create 3-4 Jira optimization tickets based on SELECT insights.

This systematic approach ensures no optimization opportunities are missed while maintaining clear visibility into the ROI of improvement efforts.

Cost culture transformation through gamification and visibility

SELECT enabled a cultural shift toward proactive cost optimization across Entain's development teams. The team shared SELECT's cost optimization tips in communication channels, leading to engineers actively discussing and sharing query improvements.

Engineers began sharing before-and-after optimization results, with managers playfully competing on week-over-week job costs. This gamification approach made cost optimization engaging rather than burdensome.

The platform also changed how the team approaches optimization investment decisions. Previously, cost optimization was often dismissed as "too hard" or "just the cost of doing business."

Now, SELECT provides clear visibility into potential savings before investing development time, enabling confident resource allocation decisions with quantifiable ROI expectations.

Looking ahead: Expanding SELECT access across data teams

Entain plans to expand SELECT access beyond heads and senior leaders to their entire data analytics team. Currently, broader visibility is provided through Slack alerts, but Blake wants direct platform access for all team members and plans to leverage SELECT's built in resource based access controls to ensure each engineer can only see costs associated with their resources.

The team is also excited about upcoming integrations, particularly direct Jira ticket creation from SELECT insights to streamline their weekly optimization workflow.

As Entain continues expanding Snowflake usage for new business use cases, SELECT remains central to ensuring they can scale efficiently while maintaining cost discipline.