Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Snowflake S-1

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 103 posts

Re: Snowflake S-1

#51

Post by theflork »

manigandham wrote: post #43
dataminded wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe that they will succeed in the long run as an independent player IN the cloud. They are always going to be less integrated and less infrastructure-cost-efficient than the native options (Redshift and BigQuery), without the R&D budgets and with incremental friction (sales) and risk (data privacy and cybersecurity). AWS really should get around to buying them, like they should have bought Looker or Table…

For them to be an attractive acquisition target means they are succeeding, otherwise what would a cloud vendor gain from buying them?

talent, patents, less competition

Re: Snowflake S-1

#52

Post by staysaasy »

Absolutely phenomenal product and company. I have a huge enterprise SaaS crush on these folks. Very solid, thoughtful team as well in my experience.

Their massive marketing spend is interesting, I suspect that they perceive themselves to be the first (or at least, strongest) mover in a once-in-a generation land grab.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#53

Post by knes »

We at Census (https://getcensus.com) are super excited by this S1 filing. Before Snowflake (and Bigquery and Redshift), data was seen as something only the fortune 500 could afford by buying Hadoop clusters and throwing an army of scientists and engineers at it.

But Snowflake has really led the way to democratize Data Warehouse the past few years and educating the market. You can start on a $50/month plan, and in our experience, the pricing scale nicely with the value you are getting out of the data. Snowflake (and Bigquery) also made it a lot less scary to get started by having an easy way to ETL data from 3rd parties (google ads, Salesforce, prod DB, etc.) to your warehouse.

Thank you, Snowflake, for paving the path for startups like Census, Fivetran, DBT, Mode to help (data) engineers and analysts do more with their data

Re: Snowflake S-1

#54

Post by chrisjc »

panarky wrote: post #50
chrisjc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using atm? After dealing with Redshift for a few years, Snowflake was and continues to be a breath of fresh air.

In your experience, what does Snowflake to better than Redshift?

Compute/Storage separation, instant shut/scale up/down (horizontally/vertically), multi-warehouse, Semi-structured queries, change streams for tables and external tables, external tables (data-lake), stored procedures, UDF/UDTFs, cloud agnostic (AWS, Azure, Google), data-exchange/data-sharing, CLI and drivers, external functions (remote inference engine invocation), snowpipe (ingest files even when your warehouses are down), tasks (DAGs), i could go on...

Scaling redshift up and down was a nightmare. Tracking files on ingestion was a nightmare. Semi-structured data into structured data was a nightmare. i could also go on...

I'm a very early customer, and a big fan of SF if you couldn't tell.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#55

Post by bpodgursky »

dataminded wrote: post #41
veritas3241 wrote: post #10

Snowflake is the go to data warehouse in my opinion. Redshift and BigQuery are fine, but Snowflake is head and shoulders above. Good community around it and tools for it (dbt - works on other warehouse though). They have the mindshare in the data warehouse market. There's so much they can do from a user experience perspective to make it even better. The integration with Numeracy was a trainwreck, but the fundamentals…

I can't believe that they will succeed in the long run as an independent player IN the cloud. They are always going to be less integrated and less infrastructure-cost-efficient than the native options (Redshift and BigQuery), without the R&D budgets and with incremental friction (sales) and risk (data privacy and cybersecurity). AWS really should get around to buying them, like they should have bought Looker or Table…

Snowflake is wildly better than Redshift, no matter how you want to look at it -- integrations, cost, performance, etc.

Like, in a sane world I agree with you -- Redshift SHOULD have a crazy competitive advantage. But somehow they've been unable to execute on that goal for half a decade, and I don't see that changing quickly, given Snowflake's mindshare and growth.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#56

Post by mrgordon »

veritas3241 wrote: post #39
mobileexpert wrote: post #29

Dumb question, given the filing today what is the earliest date it will be listed on the NYSE? Google time between S-1 and IPO gives a bunch of wishy washy answers.

I had the exact same question. Pg 127 seems to give the answer. > Date Available for Sale in the Public : The 91st day after the date of this prospectus (First Release). Edit: Seems like I was wrong. This is for current shareholders. I saw somewhere on the internet sometime in October. That's a wild guess though.

No this section is about the rules on selling for current shareholders.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#57

Post by chrisjc »

corford wrote: post #22

We're hitting some perf issues with Snowflake at work (not necessarily due to Snowflake itself but possibly more what we're trying to do with it: data warehouse storage needs but also a need for close to real-time analytical querying over that data). Has anyone here had any good/bad experiences with MemSQL?

Have you considered using change streams to keep a "view" up to date? Do you have a good cluster-key defined?

Very curious about your performance issues?

Re: Snowflake S-1

#58

Post by grey-area »

foghornleghorn wrote: post #47
grey-area wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're near the top of a huge an unprecedented bubble in tech stocks. Top 5 stocks are tech and are 23% of the S&P 500, all time highs in the middle of a pandemic with the global economy stuttering. That's a greater concentration than the year 2000. So it's a good time to IPO for tech stocks.

And you think that percentage will get lower? Please. Tech will only get larger in the long run.

A concentration of valuations in a few large companies is not a healthy sign.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#59

Post by veritas3241 »

mrgordon wrote: post #56
veritas3241 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the exact same question. Pg 127 seems to give the answer. > Date Available for Sale in the Public : The 91st day after the date of this prospectus (First Release). Edit: Seems like I was wrong. This is for current shareholders. I saw somewhere on the internet sometime in October. That's a wild guess though.

No this section is about the rules on selling for current shareholders.

Ah good catch. I don't know then.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#60

Post by AdamProut »

corford wrote: post #22

We're hitting some perf issues with Snowflake at work (not necessarily due to Snowflake itself but possibly more what we're trying to do with it: data warehouse storage needs but also a need for close to real-time analytical querying over that data). Has anyone here had any good/bad experiences with MemSQL?

This use case sounds like a good match for MemSQL at a high level (analytics with an SLA is our bread and butter).

We'll also have a lot of elasticity features of snowflake shortly without sacrificing our performance advantages. (https://www.memsql.com/blog/the-future-is-bottomless)

(disclosure: MemSQL CTO).

Post reply on HN