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Snowflake S-1

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Re: Snowflake S-1

#91

Post by deepGem »

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…

"Our business benefits from powerful network effects. The Data Cloud will continue to grow as organizations move their siloed data from cloud-based repositories and on-premises data centers to the Data Cloud. The more customers adopt our platform, the more data can be exchanged with other Snowflake customers, partners, and data providers, enhancing the value of our platform for all users. We believe this network effect will help us drive our vision of the Data Cloud."

I fail to understand this network effect. Is there any conflation here ? How does data sharing equate to network effect. Something is fundamentally not adding up here. If I share my data with 10 other customers, it should inherently enhance my experience. How does this happen with Snowflake ?

Re: Snowflake S-1

#92

Post by hodgesrm »

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…

You don't need to own the public cloud infrastructure to build a better product.

Example: you can play inside ball on storage infrastructure costs to get a 2x cost benefit at the expense of a lot of extra engineering. Better DBMS storage organization, which is available to any implementation, gets you 10x (or greater) improvement. Which would you rather have?

In fact, products like Redshift don't even really game the infrastructure prices. Costs to customers are comparable with Snowflake for equivalent resources as far as I can tell. They both charge what the market will bear.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#94

Post by choubix »

hodgesrm wrote: post #92
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…

You don't need to own the public cloud infrastructure to build a better product. Example: you can play inside ball on storage infrastructure costs to get a 2x cost benefit at the expense of a lot of extra engineering. Better DBMS storage organization, which is available to any implementation, gets you 10x (or greater) improvement. Which would you rather have? In fact, products like Redshift don't even really game the…

Hi, what yo are saying is cryptic to me would I would love to understand. would you mind breaking it down for the financially literate but tech handicapped person I am please? thanks much!!

Re: Snowflake S-1

#95

Post by veritas3241 »

deepGem wrote: post #91
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…

"Our business benefits from powerful network effects. The Data Cloud will continue to grow as organizations move their siloed data from cloud-based repositories and on-premises data centers to the Data Cloud. The more customers adopt our platform, the more data can be exchanged with other Snowflake customers, partners, and data providers, enhancing the value of our platform for all users. We believe this network effe…

I'm a little skeptical of this as well, but I think there is a path. At my previous company we would take in a lot of data from other companies and do analysis for them. If we had a really easy way to share the transformed and analyzed data after it's been modelled in the warehouse, that really would have been great. The question is, are you going to get companies to create a snowflake account just so they can access data in this way? Maybe if it's easy to export / do further analysis.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#96

Post by hodgesrm »

choubix wrote: post #94
hodgesrm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to own the public cloud infrastructure to build a better product. Example: you can play inside ball on storage infrastructure costs to get a 2x cost benefit at the expense of a lot of extra engineering. Better DBMS storage organization, which is available to any implementation, gets you 10x (or greater) improvement. Which would you rather have? In fact, products like Redshift don't even really game the…

Hi, what yo are saying is cryptic to me would I would love to understand. would you mind breaking it down for the financially literate but tech handicapped person I am please? thanks much!!

Sure! Sorry to be so obscure, it was not a good explanation. To take the above example, let's say you have a database with 1TB of tabular data in Amazon.

1. You start out storing it on Amazon gp2 Elastic Block Store, which is fast block storage available on the network. It costs about $0.10 US per month per GB, so that's $102.40 per month.

2. Data (sadly) has a habit of getting destroyed in accidents so we normally replicate to at least one other location. Let's say we just replicate once. You are now up to $204.80 per month.

Now we have a couple of ways of reducing costs.

1. We could make the block storage itself cheaper thanks to inside knowledge of how it works plus clever financial engineering. However, the _most_ that can get us is about 5x savings, because prices for similar classes of storage are not that different. The real discount is more like 2x if we want to make money and be reasonably speedy. You likely have to do engineering work--like implementing blended storage--for this latter approach, so it's not free. So, we're back to $102.40 per month.

2. Or, we could build a better database.

2a.) Let's first build a database that can store data in S3 object storage instead of block storage. Now our storage costs about $0.02 per GB per month. Plus S3 is replicated, so we can maybe just keep a single copy. We're down to $10.28 per month but we had to rewrite the database to get it, because S3 behaves very differently from block storage and we have to build clever caches to work on it.

2b.) But wait! There's more. We could also arrange tabular data in columns rather than rows, which allows us to apply very efficient compression. Let's say the compression reduces size by 90% overall. We're now down to just $1.03 per month. Again, we had to rewrite the database, but we got a huge savings in return, like 100x.

The moral is that clever arrangement of data just about always beats financial shenanigans, usually by a wide margin. The primary reason that Amazon has done well in data services like Redshift and Aurora is partly that they have been extremely smart about data services, not any inherent advantage as platform owners.

Edit: fixed math error

Re: Snowflake S-1

#97

Post by FridgeSeal »

hodgesrm wrote: post #93
FridgeSeal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this. Far superior performance, far better features.

Just out of curiosity, superior performance on which workloads? Thanks!

Pretty much everything I threw at both, Clickhouse did fatter. I never benchmarks write speeds properly, but I do know CH is capable of high write performance.

General analytics queries for the like of dashboards, CH latencies in the order of This guy has done some really in depth benchmarks: https://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-clickhouse.html

And https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html

CH is one of the fastest non-GPU databases there.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#98

Post by hodgesrm »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #97
hodgesrm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, superior performance on which workloads? Thanks!

Pretty much everything I threw at both, Clickhouse did fatter. I never benchmarks write speeds properly, but I do know CH is capable of high write performance. General analytics queries for the like of dashboards, CH latencies in the order of This guy has done some really in depth benchmarks: https://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-clickhouse.html And https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html CH is one of the…

Thanks!

Re: Snowflake S-1

#100

Post by yrotsih »

publiccomps wrote: post #99

I just wrote a S-1 teardown of Snowflake: https://blog.publiccomps.com/snowflake-s1-ipo-teardown/ Would love feedback! Included some helpful quotes from this thread too on why Snowflake vs Redshift.

With all the hype over last few years, thought they had half a billion revenue, instead a paltry $265MM in 2020(per their chart) and a loss of $365MM. In comparison, teradata has $2B revenue in 2019(market cap < $3B). Just another VC fueled. Wait for an year after IPO. The real value will be clear.
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