[HN Gopher] Why is Snowflake so Valuable?
___________________________________________________________________
Why is Snowflake so Valuable?
Author : malisper
Score : 120 points
Date : 2020-09-30 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| autokad wrote:
| I think part of it is that many know that most companies under
| perform the market. So I imagine it's not hard to see someone
| justifying (correctly or incorrectly) that its worth paying more
| for a company you think is more likely going to be one of those
| outliers. and being that there is a limited supply of these
| companies, they can shoot up in value fast.
|
| I never used snowflake, so hard for me to have a solid opinion of
| this company. I remember when facebook IPO'ed and people were
| like 'what? worth 100 billion? OVERVALUED'. and they were wrong
| in every way. so who knows? Though my gut doesn't tell me this
| company is the next facebook. coming out of the gate with a 70
| bil market cap feels like all the growth is already priced in.
|
| With facebook and on their IPO, I felt just their mobil revenue
| in 5 years time alone would be worth their valuation. But I had
| week hands. I think I bought them at 28 and sold at 22. I should
| have had more conviction because I truly did believe they were
| worth a lot more.
| victor106 wrote:
| > Net promoter score (NPS) is a way of measuring customer
| satisfaction.
|
| How easy/hard is it to fake an NPS score? Is this somehow
| regulated? Can the company only provide its most satisfied
| customers (which it knows beforehand) and only have them
| participate to get a good NPS?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| NPS can be gamified in any way you want it. If you want to use
| it as a real metric to improve your product, it's a great
| metric. But if you want to use it to convince shareholders your
| company is very valuable, it's extremely easy to do so by
| implementing certain biases.
| jmt_ wrote:
| I also have some questions/concerns over the NPS. Online
| surveys, which is effectively the instrument of NPS, typically
| yield statistically incorrect data due to, often, some flavor
| of self-selection bias. If you think of an online survey as an
| experiment, they rarely allow enough control over the sample to
| mean much. However, that's not to say it's impossible to
| properly conduct an NPS, just that it's probably very easy to
| get wrong which may paint a false picture.
| runako wrote:
| Likely this can be easily gamed. But in the context of
| Snowflake's value, NPS manifests in Net Retention, which is
| likely to be more difficult to fudge:
|
| > For every $1 of revenue Snowflake received from their
| customers a year ago, that same pool of customers are now
| paying $1.58.
|
| Net Retention is more important, but in this case it also gives
| credence to the NPS number.
| adarioble wrote:
| NPS originally came from car manufactures and industries that
| produce products that are easy comparable, I.e. how happy are
| you with the car? Would you recommend BMW to friends?
|
| I don't think it's that great for software, but it's very
| trendy. It can be gamed, like anything else, usually by sending
| NPS surveys to decision makers who aren't usually the actual
| users.
|
| Slightly better metric is Customer Effort Score (CEF) which
| shows how easy is to do business with a company.
| jredwards wrote:
| Because we're in a tech bubble. These valuations are absurd.
| drawkbox wrote:
| That and low interest rates and looking for a place to put
| money, plus the Warren Buffet multiplier.
|
| There are only 3600~ companies on the US markets [1], half of
| what was there in the 90s. There aren't many places to put lots
| of money.
|
| The rise of private equity (PE) really has taken lots of the
| growth out of the public markets but since there are so few,
| and low interest rates, people are looking for returns. Lots of
| it is also pump and dump schemes loading up stocks and then
| short and distort. The problem is the growth is tapped on
| public markets now, PE drains it before it gets there, so more
| volatility games are being played. Couple that with less
| spending purchasing power in the lower/middle and that adds to
| the games as investment in new consumer focused companies isn't
| working as well when purchasing power is drained, M2V has hit a
| precipice [2]
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-have-all-the-public-
| compa...
|
| [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
| physcab wrote:
| I've used Snowflake a fair amount. It's a decent product,
| probably on par with Redshift / BigQuery. Obviously theres a lot
| of hype and free money floating around but my take on why they
| are popular is that they are basically a replacement for large
| Hadoop installations that have become untenable to manage over
| the past decade. If a company is already using Redshift or
| BigQuery I'm not sure why they would switch.
|
| I would be apprehensive in investing in Snowflake long term
| purely because their product is highly susceptible to being
| obsoleted in the next 5-10 years.
| cgenschwap wrote:
| I was at a company that switched from Redshift to Snowflake. It
| was a night and day difference. Faster (orders of magnitude!),
| cheaper, and significantly easier to work with (since everyone
| had their own personal view of the data to mutate/work with).
|
| As far as I can tell, it is a unique product in the database
| space. Extremely well executed ideas and design.
| jeffffff wrote:
| yeah redshift is not at all comparable to snowflake. big
| query is much closer, it's ahead in some areas and in the
| last year has closed some of the gaps where it wasn't. big
| query's biggest problem is that it's tied to gcp which is a
| distant 3rd in cloud marketshare. they have big query omni
| coming which is multi-cloud but it'll probably be a while
| before it's comparable to big query in gcp.
| philjohn wrote:
| The other problem with BigQuery is that you can very easily
| write a query that's going to cost you a lot of money to
| run - with Snowflake you can let it run for an hour or so,
| and then realise it was a bad idea and you're only out a
| few credits, a handful of dollars.
|
| The killer feature for me was the query profiler - you can
| see WHY a query is taking a long time and optimise it -
| BigQuery just felt like Google were brute forcing the
| performance, and then charging you accordingly.
|
| When the project I was on switched, the micro-clusters (and
| the ability to recluster a table) as well as the MERGE
| semantics beat BigQuery hands down - although those
| features my be out of beta now (but I've moved on to a new
| gig).
| m0zg wrote:
| That's also a problem that it'd be fairly straightforward
| for Google to solve by automatically spinning up smaller,
| entirely separate serving clusters for customers who are
| worried about such a blowout (for a fee, obvs). It's just
| the serving tree (+ whatever in-memory storage service
| they use to do distributed joins nowadays), no need to
| duplicate the rest of the service. The caveat is, a
| smaller cluster will favor query optimizations specific
| to that smaller cluster. Some of those "small cluster"
| optimizations could hurt query performance when deployed
| against BQ proper with its tens of thousands of workers.
|
| Also, BQ does explain the query plan to some extent:
| https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/query-plan-explanation.
| Not quite at the level of a "regular" SQL DB, but it does
| give you some info to work with when optimizing queries.
| If you haven't used it in a while I'd give it another
| try.
| MrPowers wrote:
| Snowflake seems like a unique product and I can only imagine
| the complex math they're doing under the hood to achieve
| these incredible query times. memsql is the only real
| competitor I know of. Redshift is a lot less user friendly
| (constant need to run vacuum queries). Parquet lakes / Delta
| lakes don't have anything close to the performance.
|
| Predicate pushdown filtering enabled by the Snowflake Spark
| connector seems really promising. Lots of companies are
| currently running big data analyses on Parquet files in S3.
| Snowflake has the opportunity to grab a huge slice of the big
| data market.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> I can only imagine the complex math they're doing under
| the hood to achieve these incredible query times_
|
| Maybe its cynical/paranoid, but in this age of Theranos I
| must ask: is it possible their algorithm excels at showing
| you a reasonable looking number, rather than an accurate
| one?
| dumbfounder wrote:
| It's SQL, if they were giving wrong answers people would
| notice.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| Nothing ever gets obsolete once it gains a large foothold in
| the enterprise space. There's a reason why Oracle and IBM are
| worth what they are today.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Novell, Word Perfect
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Nothing ever gets obsolete once it gains a large foothold
| in the enterprise space.
|
| Lotus? Delphi?
| ghgdynb1 wrote:
| I think the obsolescence issue is complicated.
|
| I recently saw a criticism of Palantir which went: "The company
| has largely succeeded, they say, not because of its
| technological wizardry but because its interface is slicker and
| more user friendly than the alternatives created by defense
| contractors."
|
| A lot of the most successful tech firms started post-dot-com
| are decent interfaces to not-particularly-revolutionary
| databases. In high-end consulting and investment banking,
| appearances are hugely important. You can't have trash decks.
| It's unsurprising to me that the same is true in defense and
| intelligence. You can get a roof over your head and breakfast
| at a trashy motel or the Ritz. Everybody knows the Ritz can
| command a much higher price because "its interface is slicker
| and more user friendly than the alternatives."
|
| I think the same thing is true here.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| At the end of the day, all the data warehouses run on SQL, with
| a bit of customization around ingestion and export. Most of
| them are backed by object storage (S3/GCS) and those
| integrations look very similar.
|
| I wouldn't be that worried about lock-in or being made
| obsolete. Business logic is going to be pretty easy to port
| between Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, or whatever comes next.
| worker767424 wrote:
| > Most of them are backed by object storage (S3/GCS)
|
| Redshift is backed by worker instances that have their own
| stores in what's basically an EC2 instance. It's definitely
| not backed by S3 like Athena.
|
| Bigquery and GCS are both built on top of Colossus, but they
| have different layers in between them.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Sorry, probably should have been more precise. Meant to
| say: most users are going to interact with the warehouses
| via object storage for import and export of data.
|
| Since the object store APIs are almost identical across
| platforms, it doesn't matter that much which warehouse you
| actually use for production work. It's something that does
| massive SQL, imports data from S3, and exports data to S3.
| AtlasLion wrote:
| Same applies to Teradata vantage on cloud.
| EwanToo wrote:
| With the newer Redshift ra3 instances you use S3 backed
| storage with local SSD caching
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/features/ra3/
| zeroxfe wrote:
| > I would be apprehensive in investing in Snowflake long term
| purely because their product is highly susceptible to being
| obsoleted in the next 5-10 years.
|
| This can be said about most products and companies. What keeps
| them alive is how robustly they capture (and hold on to) the
| market, reduce costs through economies of scale, and innovate.
| This specific market is also very rapidly growing.
| boh wrote:
| I would think it wouldn't be the same product in 5-10 years.
| Hizonner wrote:
| I take it I'm supposed to know or care what "Snowflake" is...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If you don't know and don't care, you could always _not
| comment_...
| haswell wrote:
| There are many things that show up on HN that have names I
| don't recognize. When this happens, I'm excited! I get to learn
| about something I didn't know about before.
|
| A simple Google search for "Snowflake" will immediately answer
| your question - both by the company being the top result, and
| by Google conveniently including a card with an overview of the
| company.
|
| There's also plenty of stuff that shows up on HN that I don't
| care about because it's not relevant to me, but that doesn't
| mean it isn't relevant to the rest of the community.
| kwillets wrote:
| Nerds are surprisingly susceptible to hard-sell tactics.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| If you were a foreigner and had to invest your savings somewhere
| (because banks and govs are forcing negative rates) where would
| you invest
| newguy1234 wrote:
| I would invest all of it into Snowflake stock, of course.
|
| The shoe shine boy told me about it....
| jariel wrote:
| The article talks about 'good things' but doesn't put them in
| context of valuation.
|
| $60B is still too much.
|
| It's odd that Buffet is in, it's a weird signal, because this is
| a weird era for markets: all other things equal, we are looking
| at .com-ish situations here and the timing would be ideal for a
| true crash.
|
| That the world economy is shrinking by 10% and governments, major
| industries are going insolvent should be scary.
|
| Perhaps investors think they are preparing for the 'covid future'
| but this may be a weird kind of inflation whereby everything else
| (including cash) is crap so they are piling into winners.
|
| There is an emotion to a lot of stocks these days that is
| probably making every analysts job a nightmare - if the CEO or
| company is popular, it really messes with valuation.
| panda88888 wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind is the price at which Buffet
| invested. I vaguely remember they he invested at about $70 per
| share (I may be wrong. Just going by memory here). This means
| there are a lot of buffer room for correction at current price
| of around $250.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Am I wrong if I say that they are so valuable (in monetary terms)
| just because they are the only (or one of the few) non-free
| database management systems (or whatever they are)?
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| Not really, they're largely targeting the same kind of use
| cases as redshift and bigquery.
| sharadov wrote:
| Ok, It's a great product, but valuation still does not make
| sense!
| [deleted]
| newguy1234 wrote:
| My experience with investing tells me that you will never get a
| good investment at a fair value, you always have to pay a
| premium for it. There is a pretty consistent pattern in my
| stock portfolio. The stocks that I overpaid for ended up being
| great investments while the stocks that I thought I was getting
| a deal on ended up being a disaster of an investment.
| soumyadeb wrote:
| People are excited about Snowflake because it can completely
| disrupt the traditional data-warehouse market.
|
| The legacy players like Teradata and Exadata (from Oracle) really
| don't scale. Teradata has ~2B in revenue, Exadata is probably in
| the same range. That's all up for grabs but that's only
| scratching the surface.
|
| Historically, only transactional data was dumped into the
| warehouse. Snowflake is selling storage at S3 price (plus you get
| compression so often ends up cheaper) while they are making money
| of compute/query. If they can provide all the right query
| abstractions (SQL, full-text search), in theory all data can be
| thrown in Snowflake. Yes, tech savy bay area companies can setup
| their own stack using Presto etc but rest of the world is not
| like that.
| CharlesW wrote:
| [Teradata employee here.]
|
| > _The legacy players like Teradata and Exadata (from Oracle)
| really don 't scale._
|
| I get why Teradata gets labelled "legacy", but one of
| Teradata's main differentiators is scale. Teradata engineers
| have been tackling incredibly interesting scale problems (on
| many dimensions of "scale") for 40 years. Teradata has many
| customers who routinely manage and perform analytics on many
| petabytes of data.
|
| > _Historically, only transactional data was dumped into the
| warehouse._
|
| That was once true, because initially that was all the data
| that companies had. However, companies have long since used
| data warehouses for all kinds of data -- sensor data, text,
| behavioral data, product info/BOMs, vendor info, contract info,
| etc. -- whatever's necessary to run the business.
|
| > _Snowflake is selling storage at S3 price..._
|
| This is important, but not unique. For example, Teradata's
| current product has native support for S3 and S3-compatible
| object stores, and you can query them just like any other
| database table, join that data with data in high-performance
| native storage, etc.
| soumyadeb wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't clarify well. I am sure it scales technically
| well but not on cost.
|
| My experience of TD is > 10 yrs and then the multi-node
| version was substantially more expensive than the single-node
| version. Also, storage and compute was coupled which meant I
| had to pay for nodes even if 99% of my data was cold. That's
| a problem with RedShift too but not for Snowflake.
|
| De-coupling storage and compute was a brilliant move by
| Snowflake. BigQuery can completely abstracted compute - you
| don't provision compute and only pay for data scanned.
| However, it gives you a sense of insecurity around cost - A
| single bad cron job running a query every sec can blow up
| your cost (real-life experience). Snowflake provides the best
| cost/performance tradeoff I have seen.
| chrisjc wrote:
| > Teradata's current product has native support for S3 and
| S3-compatible object stores too, and you can query them just
| like any other database table, join that data with data in
| high-performance native storage, etc.
|
| Storage costs for S3 (or any cloud-provider object storage)
| are only one dimension of the price. The other is interaction
| costs which can get prohibitively expensive, for example if
| you accidentally forget to provide a partition key in your
| query predicate. Snowflake absorbs this cost if you use
| internal storage (or just copy into tables).
| hilbertseries wrote:
| > Yes, tech savy bay area companies can setup their own stack
| using Presto etc but rest of the world is not like that.
|
| My last company was an early adopter of Snowflake. And we tried
| Presto first, circa 2016 and Presto was sloooow. We were using
| vertica at the time and it was so much slower. Snowflake on the
| other hand was able to perform on the same order of latency as
| Vertica, which was pretty crazy to us.
| kwillets wrote:
| So why did you switch from Vertica (or did you)?
| hilbertseries wrote:
| Vertica was too expensive, their licensing fees were
| terrible at our scale. Operations were also awful, if we
| had two nodes go down we were always in trouble. We built
| an EBS solution that made it a little better, but it still
| wasn't tenable long term.
| kwillets wrote:
| Good info -- thanks.
|
| Their Eon mode product is very similar to Snowflake, with
| S3 storage and semi-dynamic compute nodes, but they may
| not be as slick at marketing it or providing a UI.
| soumyadeb wrote:
| That's interesting. I thought Vertica's pitch was real-time
| analytics for which draditional disk based data-warehouses
| are too slow.
| hilbertseries wrote:
| Vertica is a disk based analyctics database. It was very
| fast, but also very expensive. And hardware failures could
| be particularly difficult to recover from.
| baskire wrote:
| Smaller companies with presto won't get the same performance
| benefit.
|
| Snowflake & BigQuery get the ability to have multiple customers
| on a large cluster.
|
| It'd be cost prohibitive for a single smaller customer to have
| all that compute sitting idle for a few queries per minute.
|
| Storage also benefits as snowflake/ BQ can shard your data
| across a much larger array of disk giving you better IO.
|
| Think is it faster to drive a car 100 ft starting at 0mph and
| flooring it. Or to drive 100ft with a car which starts off
| doing 120mph
| ETHisso2017 wrote:
| >>>Yes, tech savy bay area companies can setup their own stack
| using [insert open source tool here] etc but rest of the world
| is not like that.
|
| It sounds like a ton of these cloud infra companies have this
| product strategy (datadog, snowflake, elastic, hashicorp, etc)
| Spartan-S63 wrote:
| When you look at cloud infra companies like that, their
| competitive advantage is in quickly being able to ingest data
| and make it accessible, so an off-the-shelf solution likely
| doesn't exist for their particular use-case. Also, since that
| operation is your competitive advantage, you should look to
| in-source it rather than reach for a COTS solution.
| jng wrote:
| Can someone summarize Snowflake's unique technical value? I'm
| quite familiar with both Redshift (I would summarize it as
| Postgres adapted to sharded, columnar OLAP functioning) and
| BigQuery (there is a famous paper explaining the architecture).
| Also with more traditional databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL,
| SQL Server, and columnar OLAP databases like Vertica. I explored
| the website a little bit, but couldn't construe a clear statement
| of the technical architectural value. Some of the comments here
| are valuable, but I'm missing a clearer "big picture" overview.
| Thanks!
| malisper wrote:
| (I'm the author of the post.)
|
| I've worked with a large Postgres cluster before (~1PB of data)
| and have been experimenting with Snowflake recently. I would
| say there's two clear technical advantages of Snowflake over
| Redshift. First is there's no maintenance when using Snowflake.
| You just signup for a Snowflake account, upload a CSV, and you
| can start querying the data. This is in contrast to Redshift
| where you have to manually provision a cluster, resize it as
| you add more data, etc.
|
| The second is their pricing. Storing data in Snowflake costs
| the same as it would cost to store in S3. The tradeoff is you
| also have to pay based on how long your queries take. Depending
| on your workload this can result in a massive cost savings. If
| you access only small amounts of your data infrequently, it's
| like you're storing the data in S3 and you only have to pay a
| bit more when accessing the data. This is in contrast to
| Redshift where you have to pay for the full cost of the cluster
| regardless of whether you are actually querying the data or
| not.
|
| Snowflake also has a ton of quality of life improvements
| compared to Redshift. One really nice thing is you can change
| the amount of compute used for any individual query. For
| example, if you have one specific slow query, you can allocate
| 4x the compute for that one query, pay 4x as much while the
| query is running, and get the query to run 4x faster
| (ultimately costing you the same amount as if you used 1x the
| compute).
|
| One neat thing is there's ultimately only one "Snowflake
| instance" in each region. Everyone's tables are in the same
| instance, but you can only access the tables you have
| permission to access. This allows you to easily share data
| between different Snowflake accounts. You can store the data in
| one account and query it from another.
|
| So the core value proposition is really strong and it also has
| a bunch of extra features that are all pretty useful at the end
| of the day.
|
| This post focused on Snowflake solely from a business point of
| view. I'm considering writing another one that focuses on it
| from a technical point of view.
| jng wrote:
| Thanks for the details, very useful. Please write that post,
| I'm sure it will make it to the front page here :)
| soared wrote:
| Snowflake's value is that they provide the same technical
| products as amazon/google/etc, but are not amazon/google/etc.
| Some shops like buying into the google ecosystem, some are
| afraid of vendor lock in.
|
| Probably other things, but many companies exist just to be
| alternatives to faang. If you're good enough, you surpass that
| intention.
| jng wrote:
| I saw them a year or two ago positioning themselves in
| contrast to Redshift and BigQuery. I though "these guys are
| building something for Microsoft to acquire" (my thought was,
| something with a more modern OLAP architecture than SQL
| Server, which they can offer via Azure). Naive me, they were
| so much more business savvy than that...
| bob33212 wrote:
| People want to own the next Salesforce. Snowflake could expand
| into ERP/CRM/Visualizations. There is over 50B revenue across the
| world in those areas.
| jariel wrote:
| Those lines of business are very far away from Snowflake.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| As someone who spends a lot of time in this space, their only
| "killer app" is automated workload / data distribution
| management. Which is cool, and hard to get right, but clearly
| something the cloud vendors and other data players are have taken
| steps towards / offer more or less the same outcomes.
|
| And in contrast their Silicon Valley roots means a lot of their
| tooling/UX/data capabilities are ... undercooked. Their Web IDE
| feels like a throwback to 2003 Hadoop, their ETL capabilities are
| a joke, they don't support joins in views ...
|
| And they've also squandered some opportunities to actually offer
| a differentiating "all in one" data processing experience for ad
| hoc/exploratory, BI/aggregated, and Big Data/AI/ML model
| crunching. For example, here's their garbage blog post on Spark
| SQL - https://www.snowflake.com/blog/snowflake-spark-
| part-2-pushin...
|
| tl;dr when someone writes a Spark job that includes a filter
| against data in Snowflake, it's more efficient to let Snowflake
| filter the data before shipping it off to the (much more
| performant) Spark engine to do the actual analytical pieces of
| the query plan, instead of just shipping all the data over and
| letting Spark do the filtering.
|
| Like ... wow, predicate pushdown is your answer?
|
| Contrast with Azure Synapse providing Spark and SQL Server
| compute in the same environment; Databricks adding Delta Lake
| capabilities to be more schema-on-write friendly; Dremio building
| AI into their caching, and Starburst into their workload
| management ...
|
| Anyway, I don't see any secret sauce, which means it's still just
| traditional enterprise sales cycles...
| chrisjc wrote:
| > they don't support joins in views
|
| Perhaps you mean they don't support joins in Materialized Views
| (uppercase M)? We use Snowflake views with joins all over the
| place. Furthermore if views don't cut it for you, you can
| always use joins in UDTFs. Or if you really need joins in a
| materialize view (lowercase M), you can use change streams in
| combination with joins to maintain your own materialized view
| (table).
|
| > instead of just shipping all the data over and letting Spark
| do the filtering
|
| Forgive my ignorance, but in what capacity would this be less
| efficient? Doesn't it make more sense to reduce you result set
| before shipping it off to external compute?
| yalogin wrote:
| I don't know anything about Snowflake but in general they are
| fortunate to go public in this time. The tech market is in a
| bubble and investors are frothy at the mouth for tech stocks.
| Pessimism started to creep in for some of the already sky high
| tech stocks. Snowflake IPO'd right at that time and people just
| flocked to it.
| aerodog wrote:
| buffet effect. it's insane
| gumby wrote:
| Because interest rates are super low and there's a lot of
| uninvested capital sloshing around.
| [deleted]
| zwieback wrote:
| I guess this quote from the article sums it up: "There was so
| much hype, my mom, who doesn't even know what Snowflake is,
| decided to invest in Snowflake."
| joshdick wrote:
| "Taxi drivers told you what to buy. The shoeshine boy could
| give you a summary of the day's financial news as he worked
| with rag and polish. An old beggar who regularly patrolled the
| street in front of my office now gave me tips and, I suppose,
| spent the money I and others gave him in the market. My cook
| had a brokerage account and followed the ticker closely. Her
| paper profits were quickly blown away in the gale of 1929."
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Almost all the big companies I worked for had a "database gang"
| -- a database group which, in the name of centralization, forced
| you to bow to them to get anything. New DB? bow to them. More
| nodes? bow to them. Reboot? bow to them. The internal budget
| "prices" would be off the charts unbelievable.
|
| It makes sense to centralize, but only at a certain cost. Beyond
| that cost, it is better to just de-centralize because not every
| project can spend 4-5 months of meetings to spin up a DB.
|
| The cloud changed this because it became an OpEx discussion and
| something you could spin up on your own. For non-production
| workloads, it comes especially obvious to do this.
| chrisjc wrote:
| > it is better to just de-centralize
|
| Until you want to join and then all of sudden it's not your
| problem. Then you end up with a "gang" of cowboy analysts
| running ad-hoc data-dumps against operational datastores
| affecting production uptime and stability only so that they can
| do a lookup between the multiple (source_table_column_count *
| source_table_row_count) sheets in their uber excel document.
|
| I'm all for decomposing the monolith as long as you have a plan
| for recomposing when it's necessary.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Yep, thats why I said centralizing makes sense -- up until
| some price point. Beyond that point, you might as well just
| spend the money on re-composing when you need.
| chrisjc wrote:
| Fair point! Sorry I missed that.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| This still in no way answers why Snowflake is so valuable,
| though. I completely understand our argument, and I agree with
| it; I just don't think the article's arguments are anything
| else than ex post facto rationalization. When they mentioned
| NPS I almost snorted my coffee, that metric can be gamified in
| any way you want it.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _> > Almost all the big companies I worked for had a
| "database gang" -- a database group which, in the name of
| centralization, forced you to bow to them to get anything.
| New DB? bow to them. More nodes? bow to them. Reboot? bow to
| them. The internal budget "prices" would be off the charts
| unbelievable._
|
| _> This still in no way answers why Snowflake is so
| valuable, though._
|
| It explains it to a T! You have something you want, but
| internal company politics and territoriality keep you from
| getting it the way you want. An outside provider lets
| everyone get it for a bit of cash. It's basically the same
| play as Salesforce. It's not some kind of technical moonshot.
| It has to do with a modicum of technology delivered by a 3rd
| party who can avoid all of the internal friction.
|
| The next founder who can think of this kind of play, then
| execute on it, will be the next Salesforce/Snowflake, and
| will probably have the ear of the same investors!
| stingraycharles wrote:
| What I meant was why Snowflake _specifically_ is so
| valuable. BigQuery, Redshift or any other cloud db would
| fill this gap as well. Why Snowflake?
| mr_toad wrote:
| > What I meant was why Snowflake specifically
|
| Marketing. Vast amounts of marketing.
| mmm_grayons wrote:
| It's a chance for investors to get in on the next big
| thing and invest specifically in data warehousing. No one
| can put his money directly into BigQuery or Redshift.
|
| Edit: why are so many people downvoting this? Is there
| some other reason for Snowflake's valuation (aside from
| tech bubble playing a role)?
| chrisjc wrote:
| Snowflake fanboy here who can't really answer your
| question about why it's so valuable. Not sure I can
| rationalize the current value. Not sure I think it should
| be valued this much.
|
| But I can probably answer why Snowflake instead of
| Redshift (sorry, not too familiar with BigQuery)...
|
| First of all it's cloud-provider agnostic so you can set
| up Snowflake on any or all of the 3 major cloud providers
| as well as set up replication between them directly or
| indirectly through their data exchange. Probably the most
| powerful feature is the way that Snowflake has the
| ability to scale (up or down) compute (vertically and
| horizontal) and storage independently of each other.
| Furthermore, you have the ability to scale compute down
| to nothing, and spin up "instantly" when the demand
| arrives. On top of all of this there is an incredible
| selection of functionality that i could go on and on
| about.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Honestly, if you don't mind, please do. I believe the
| decoupled elastic compute / storage advantage has been
| well described; what are the more granular or technical
| things you like?
|
| Edit: seems you've already answered this :)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24265856
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I find Snowflake much easier to use than BigQuery,
| Redshift. It is also cloud-service-provider agnostic. So
| your only hook at that point is ingest + any snowflake-
| specific SQL (and obviously security migration etc.) So
| for retention, they compete on UX rather than walls.
|
| W/r/t value, the idea is a disproportionate of egress
| from Oracle, Teradata, etc will end up at Snowflake,
| hence huge TAM, SAM, and SOM.
| hitekker wrote:
| > The internal budget "prices" would be off the charts
| unbelievable.
|
| I find that this occurs when an infrastructure team considers
| itself a "platform". The only supplier of an asset that
| everyone else demands can set the "price" of the asset as high
| as they want.
| jcfrei wrote:
| I don't see it mentioned in the article but isn't one of the main
| selling points of Snowflake their data exchange? Companies upload
| their data to Snowflake in the hopes of someday monetizing it? If
| that's the case then I think it's just a matter of time until
| regulators become interested too.
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