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

61–70 of 103 posts

Re: Snowflake S-1

#61

Post by jsperson »

saas_sam wrote: post #45
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?

You pay a lot to acquire customers up front but as long as your churn is net negative (ie., customers end up spending more year over year) you end up coming out way ahead. Sales reps only get paid on a contract one time, based on the value of that initial subscription revenue. $0 commission when it renews next year, and the year after, and the year after... (Small caveat that someone probably gets commission on follo…

Based on the quality of support I think they will have high retention. We’re currently a relatively small customer and the support has been excellent. I submitted a bug and it was fixed on our production account in less than two months. This included a step through on our dev account. It would have taken me two months just to convince Oracle and Microsoft that they had a bug.

I had a couple of other minor issues and got very good response.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#62

Post by ironchef »

jrott wrote: post #5
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.

Snowflake is pretty nice compared to redshift. Though I really wish there copying data out of s3 worked better then it does.

Which part don’t you like? We’ve used snow pipes and it seems to work quite well.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#63

Post by paulsutter »

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…

There's been an IPO winter for about 20 years, so yes this flurry of S1s is exciting for tech folks

http://www.bretswanson.com/index.php/2017/01/reasons-for-opt...

Re: Snowflake S-1

#64

Post by corford »

chrisjc wrote: post #57
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?

We make heavy use of views within Snowflake, have sensible cluster keying and, further downstream, also leverage things like Looker's PDTs and Elastic Search.

The issue is we have billions of rows and very varied analytical requirements, so there are quite a few "pathalogical" queries.

Change streams are something we're looking at (as well as MemSQL, Clickhouse etc.)

Re: Snowflake S-1

#65

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Snowflake S-1

#66

Post by aqme28 »

ganoushoreilly wrote: post #3

Now I know why our teams internally have been hammered by sales at Snowflake for the past 4 months. Like, relentless, to the point where I doubt we'd entertain their solution even if we had a need. Sorta like Datadog..

They wouldn't stop calling me even when I told them to stop. I wouldn't use them either just out of frustration.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#67

Post by cater90 »

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).

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

Re: Snowflake S-1

#68

Post by cater90 »

corford wrote: post #64
chrisjc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We make heavy use of views within Snowflake, have sensible cluster keying and, further downstream, also leverage things like Looker's PDTs and Elastic Search. The issue is we have billions of rows and very varied analytical requirements, so there are quite a few "pathalogical" queries. Change streams are something we're looking at (as well as MemSQL, Clickhouse etc.)

What are your performance requirements? I've found Snowflake to be fast enough for most workloads, but if you're talking in the sub-500ms range, then MemSQL's in-memory capabilities will help. Though I must warn you that the system is a pain to manage and their managed service is unproven.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#69

Post by jwatte »

afpx wrote: post #32
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…

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 myself than paying Amazon for an EC2 instance" -- there are cases where that is true, but there are many, many, cases where the "on demand capacity" is the bigger benefit.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#70

Post by zten »

chrisjc wrote: post #54
panarky wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

Two things I could wish for:

- Performance from tables not cached on the warehouse instance is awful. That the price you pay for shutting a warehouse down.

- I wish it were cheaper. If you run queries against a warehouse 24/7, preventing from auto-shutdown, you better hope it's tiny. And even then, the cost might incentivize you to employ a different strategy entirely.

The other stuff you mention is them building a moat around your data lake. They're pretty good at that. I'd happily get locked into Snowflake for the moment. Redshift really does look like an amateur hour product in comparison to the tools you get with Snowflake.

Even then, as good as Snowflake is, our internal users went from complaining about the performance of Looker and Redshift to complaining about the performance of Tableau and Snowflake. I don't know if you can ever please anyone in this space...

Post reply on HN