Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
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Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
#2It seems like Snowflake is going all-in on building features and doing marketing that encourage their customers to build applications, serving operational workloads, etc... on them. Things like in-product analytics, usage-based billing, personalization, etc...
Anyone here taking them up on it? I'm genuinely curious how it's going.
Re: Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
#3It seems like Snowflake is going all-in on building features and doing marketing that encourage their customers to build applications, serving operational workloads, etc... on them. Things like in-product analytics, usage-based billing, personalization, etc... Anyone here taking them up on it? I'm genuinely curious how it's going.
I assume they're angling for a salesforce acquisition as they move towards being a micro-hosting service like salesforce.
Re: Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
#4It seems like Snowflake is going all-in on building features and doing marketing that encourage their customers to build applications, serving operational workloads, etc... on them. Things like in-product analytics, usage-based billing, personalization, etc... Anyone here taking them up on it? I'm genuinely curious how it's going.
I've noticed that too. I think the marketing is definitely working, I'm seeing a few organisations starting to shift more and more workloads onto them, and some are also publishing datasets on their marketplace.
One of their most interesting offerings coming up is Snowpark which lets you run a Python function as a UDF, within Snowflake. This way you don't have to transfer data around everywhere, just run it as part of your normal SQL statements. It's also possible to pickle a function and send it over... so conceivably one could train a data science model and run that as part of a SQL statement. This could get very interesting.
Re: Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
#5It seems like Snowflake is going all-in on building features and doing marketing that encourage their customers to build applications, serving operational workloads, etc... on them. Things like in-product analytics, usage-based billing, personalization, etc... Anyone here taking them up on it? I'm genuinely curious how it's going.
I assume they're angling for a salesforce acquisition as they move towards being a micro-hosting service like salesforce.
Snowflake is worth at least 25% of Salesforce so such an acquisition is very unlikely unless Salesforce has $60 billion or more burning a hole in their pocket.
Re: Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
#6[flagged]
Re: Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
#7I caught myself wondering how Google, Microsoft and Amazon let Snowflake win. You can argue they haven't won, but lets assume they have. Two things:
1. SNOW's market cap is $50B. GOOGL, MSFT, AMZN are all over $1T. Owning Snowflake would be a drop in the bucket for any of them (let alone if they were splitting the revenue).
2. Snowflake runs on AWS, GCP or Azure (customers choice), so a good chunk of their revenue goes back to these services.
Looking at these two points as the CEO of GOOGL, MSFT, or AMZN, I'd shrug away Snowflake "beating us". It's crazy that you can build a $50B company that your largest competitors barely care about.
Re: Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
#8I caught myself wondering how Google, Microsoft and Amazon let Snowflake win. You can argue they haven't won, but lets assume they have. Two things: 1. SNOW's market cap is $50B. GOOGL, MSFT, AMZN are all over $1T. Owning Snowflake would be a drop in the bucket for any of them (let alone if they were splitting the revenue). 2. Snowflake runs on AWS, GCP or Azure (customers choice), so a good chunk of their revenue go…
I agree. The cloud providers are basically the guys who sell shovels in gold rush. Snowflake still needs to build on top the clouds so MAG never lose. I heard that SNOW is offering its own cloud services but I could be wrong -- and even if I'm correct they have a super long way to catch up.
Re: Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
#9It seems like Snowflake is going all-in on building features and doing marketing that encourage their customers to build applications, serving operational workloads, etc... on them. Things like in-product analytics, usage-based billing, personalization, etc... Anyone here taking them up on it? I'm genuinely curious how it's going.
Disclaimer: I work at SingleStoreDB.
Building a database that can handle both analytics and operations is what we've been working on for the past 10+ years. Our customers use us to build applications with a strong analytical component to them (all of the use cases you mentioned and many more).
How's it going? It's going really well! And we're working on some really cool things that will expand our offering from being a pure data storage solution to much more of a platform[1].
If you want to learn more about our architecture, we published this paper at SIGMOD in late 2022 about it[2].
[1]: https://davidgomes.com/databases-cant-be-just-databases-anym...
Re: Uses and abuses of cloud data warehouses
#10It seems like Snowflake is going all-in on building features and doing marketing that encourage their customers to build applications, serving operational workloads, etc... on them. Things like in-product analytics, usage-based billing, personalization, etc... Anyone here taking them up on it? I'm genuinely curious how it's going.
I've noticed that too. I think the marketing is definitely working, I'm seeing a few organisations starting to shift more and more workloads onto them, and some are also publishing datasets on their marketplace. One of their most interesting offerings coming up is Snowpark which lets you run a Python function as a UDF, within Snowflake. This way you don't have to transfer data around everywhere, just run it as part o…
In theory, fine. Then you look at the walled garden that is Snowpark - only "approved" python libraries are allowed there. It will be a very constrictive set of models you can train, and very constrictive feature engineering in Python. And, wait, aren't Python UDFs super-slow (GIL) - what about Pandas UDFs (wait that's PySpark.....)