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Snowflake S-1

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Re: Snowflake S-1

#81

Post by filesystem »

jwatte wrote: post #69
afpx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, also very expensive. You can do queries on a spark cluster for tiny fractions of what they charge. But, snowflake makes things easy for the "decision makers" (who know SQL). So, all good.

Having run a medium size Spark cluster, I'm not sure I agree. If you have 80-100% utilization for a month, perhaps, but the beauty of Snowflake is that you can spin up a 3XL warehouse for a few MINUTES to get answers fast, and then shut it down again and don't pay anything. Saying "you could run it on self-managed Spark/Oracle/Hive/SQLite" is approximately the same argument as saying "I can run a web server cheaper m…

I'm not sure how the pricing compares, but there are SaaS spark cluster offerings. Databricks is probably the biggest.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#82

Post by sails »

manigandham wrote: post #33
flyinglizard wrote: post #15

What is the difference between a "Data Warehouse", a "Data Lake" and a plain old managed SQL Server instance I run on Azure?

Data Warehouse is usually a relational database designed for large OLAP analysis with features like column-oriented storage, vectorized processing, and distributed scale-out architecture. Since it's a database, the focus is on strong schemas and structured data, although all major systems also support JSON datatypes now. Data Lake is usually object storage or other large storage pool with raw files. These can be diff…

Great answer.

On Data Lakes: I often use an S3 data lake construct as a staging area for my Snowflake data warehouse.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#83

Post by jschumacher »

pupdogg wrote: post #28

> "Our net loss was $178.0 million and $348.5 million for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively" Is that supposed to sound attractive to institutional investors?

It's not supposed to sound attractive, but investors will largely care about the YoY growth of 121% for Q2.

They spend a ton of money on Sales & Marketing (293,577k in the last fiscal year). That's what's driving a lot of their growth I assume and it's a lever they can pull back to increase profitability.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#84

Post by turk- »

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?

Spark/Databricks + Delta lake would be a good solution for combining streaming and batch analytics. MemSQL is good for low latency streaming.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#85

Post by curiousDog »

AdamProut wrote: post #60
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).

Orthogonal question, what happened to you guys? At one point you were the hottest start up on the block every ICPC competitive brogrammer wanted to get into and then you just fell off the radar..

Re: Snowflake S-1

#86

Post by zhte415 »

jwatte wrote: post #69
afpx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, also very expensive. You can do queries on a spark cluster for tiny fractions of what they charge. But, snowflake makes things easy for the "decision makers" (who know SQL). So, all good.

Having run a medium size Spark cluster, I'm not sure I agree. If you have 80-100% utilization for a month, perhaps, but the beauty of Snowflake is that you can spin up a 3XL warehouse for a few MINUTES to get answers fast, and then shut it down again and don't pay anything. Saying "you could run it on self-managed Spark/Oracle/Hive/SQLite" is approximately the same argument as saying "I can run a web server cheaper m…

> the beauty of Snowflake is that you can spin up a 3XL warehouse for a few MINUTES to get answers fast, and then shut it down again and don't pay anything

Is this why they're making a $350mn annual loss?

A million dollars a day loss would be a pretty big deal to me.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#87

Post by veritas3241 »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #76
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…

Sorry you had a bad experience with it. Certainly compared to redshift it's a dream. I use it every day and it's been great for us.
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