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Snowflake S-1

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Re: Snowflake S-1

#71

Post by jwatte »

mabbo wrote: post #44

Maybe I'm not really wise to the world of finance and what-have-you, but how many S-1s do I need to see in short succession before I start to ask: "What's going on, guys?" Like, is this a indication that a lot of people are trying to exchange their companies for hard cash as quickly as possible? It kind of looks a lot like that. This is what, the 3rd or 4th one to hit the HN front-page lately? Is... is that a bad sig…

Business was at a standstill in 2008. It takes 8-10 years to go from embryo to IPO these days. Thus, a lot of companies got started in 2010-2012, and are now reaching IPO maturity. I think this is a "ketchup bottle" effect rather than a sign of the end times.

(That being said, the end times may ALSO be upon us, but not because of this particular sign.)

Re: Snowflake S-1

#72

Post by AdamProut »

cater90 wrote: post #67
AdamProut wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Will "bottomless" have the ability to spin up multiple compute clusters on a centralized storage layer?

Yes

Re: Snowflake S-1

#73

Post by mint2 »

knes wrote: post #53

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 o…

If I hear census, especially with a capital “C”, I don’t think a business or startup. Are you in the US? Do a lot of people express confusion? How will you trademark your name?

Re: Snowflake S-1

#74

Post by dataminded »

bpodgursky wrote: post #55
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…

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.

I agree with you.

Snowflake is better. Redshift has been really slow to execute. AWS is doing the world's worst job of articulating whatever vision they have for analytics. AWS's message is laser-focused on infrastructure folks and machine learning engineers (not analyst, data scientist, not absolutely anything else).

The higher you go up the stack, the slower and less meaningful, AWS's solutions feel. There is a fantastic job opportunity out there for someone to reconcile AWS's data analytics offerings. They have so much upside.

I'm still not betting on Snowflake winning a direct competition with their primary supplier. For the enterprise and the highly regulated: Redshift is good enough, already there, and they don't NEED the efficiencies that Snowflake makes available.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#75

Post by mr_toad »

supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, Sales + Marketing pretty much 1.5x their revenue ($265M), swinging them from +50% operating margins to -150-200% net margins. They are really trying to cram this product down people's throats, huh?

All these breathless reviews can’t come cheap.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#76

Post by FridgeSeal »

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 could not disagree more.

Working with it was fraught with issues. Performance was mediocre at best, it was horribly expensive, Python and JS client libs had re-occurring issues with disconnecting and reconnecting. The advice given to us around scaling concurrent connections was bizarre at best. Teammates had numerous issues where it was clear corners had been cut in handling some edge cases around handling certain unicode characters. Their Snowpipe "streaming" implementation was...not good. The idea of having having compute workers that "spun up and down" sounded good in theory, but in practice lead to more bottlenecks and delays than anything else.

The AWS outage last year that prevented you from provisioning new instances essentially crippled our snowflake DB.

I almost go out of my way to recommend people _not_ use it. I keep seeing it pop up, but mostly because it seems they're doing what Mongo DB did in the early days and just throw marketing money to capture mindshare as opposed to being an actually good product.

We changed to ClickHouse and the difference was literally night-and-day. The performance especially was far superior.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#77

Post by FridgeSeal »

supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, Sales + Marketing pretty much 1.5x their revenue ($265M), swinging them from +50% operating margins to -150-200% net margins. They are really trying to cram this product down people's throats, huh?

It feels very much like early MongoDB days, where they are attempting to capture mind/market share by aggressively marketing as opposed to competing on product quality and features.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#79

Post by FridgeSeal »

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?

Haven't used MemSQL, but check out ClickHouse.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#80

Post by FridgeSeal »

alexbanks wrote: post #12

Snowflake is by far the best data warehouse I have ever used. I would use it at any job where data warehousing was a keystone of our work. Really 10/10, not even close.

Out of curiousity, have you used ClickHouse?

Because I had the opposite experience - you literally couldn't pay me to use Snowflake again.

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