Why Everyone Cares About Snowflake

Scrolling through Linkedin, I continue to find other data engineers who echo the same sentiment I have when it comes to cloud data warehouses.

That is to say that Snowflake and Bigquery are dominating the market.

But here is the thing, According to Slintel, Amazon Redshift is still dominating the market with 26.36%( of course it doesn’t take much searching to find completely different numbers and ranking on different sites for the same few products).

So perhaps that point is moot.

What isn’t moot is the underlying current among data professionals who have had a chance up to use Snowflake.

Many seem to enjoy it?

The question is.

Why?

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About me:
I have spent my career focused on all forms of data. I have focused on developing algorithms to detect fraud, reduce patient readmission and redesign insurance provider policy to help reduce the overall cost of healthcare. I have also helped develop analytics for marketing and IT operations in order to optimize limited resources such as employees and budget. I privately consult on data science and engineering problems both solo as well as with a company called Acheron Analytics. I have experience both working hands-on with technical problems as well as helping leadership teams develop strategies to maximize their data.

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[ThiagoMoreiraGoncalves]

They are getting bigger and bigger. I work for a big German company and they are switching from SAP HANA to Snowflake.

[pedromogga]

The big shift going forward is data sharing. People massively underestimate its potential. If a large organisation such as a Bank incorporates data sharing in the cloud (such as Snowflake) it means that they can publish that data once and everybody with access can use that same data without having to resort to ETL. Presently they construct REST APIs to retrieve the data and all consumers then use it in their multiple ETL process to retrieve it into their own particular database...producing many sets of duplicated data. The classic scenario is Exchange Rates in Banks. Also, Data APIs are often very slow when large data volumes are being used whereas having the data already in a highly performant storage and compute environment would be must faster.

[tamelo]

In the last month I applied to about 20 positions in Data Engineering.
None required Snowflake experience.
From the 5 interviews I got so far none was using Snowflake.
I've been very curious about learning and have hands-on experience with it. But it is weird that I am not hearing that much about it in the wild.

[ALEXthebizNEZ]

you opened my mind to snowflake. was helpful to hear an opinion that wasnt from Snowflakes tutorial videos. THANK YOU!

[shashankemani]

Amazing video. Snowflake is just a fantastic data solution of improving the shortcomings of traditional cloud scalability and distributed systems. Looking forward to getting my hands on it soon.

[LukeBarousse]

I've actually wondered why it gets so much hype as well... I even heard non-tech savvy people talk about snowflake, when I don't feel confident that they even know what it is used for.

[SravaniReddy-fb]

can you do an dedicated vedio about the difference between snowflake, gcp, aws and azure

[font]

I have become a big fan of taking a hybrid approach to clients, using databricks and medallion arch on lake w/ delta tables etc. for bronze (raw) and silver (persisted source aligned version of your data with basic cleansing rules applied), but with the gold layer, taking a use case based approach, with snowflake, redshift, synapse (depending on vendor of choice) operating as a DWH, as a use case for classic BI & managed reporting etc. or alternativley, if an advanced modelling technique is in place (ML, statistical model etc.), this will be powered by databricks and generally have the results stored in the lake gold layer (which could end up in your DWH as well if required).

Great video, thanks for sharing your insights as always.

[chessopenings]

Great video! Didn't know about the Streamlit acquisition. DBT looks like Snowflake's next target.+

[hughesadam]

I love these types of "how'd we get here" tech topics. Really great!

[anglaisaveclamerloque]

So glad I stumbled upon your channel, thanks Seattle Data Guy!

[StephenPace]

Snowflake uses a consumption model. Use more, pay more. Use less, pay less. At 08:00 you say "Snowflake costs have gone up" but strictly speaking, , Snowflake costs themselves have actually gotten cheaper (better compression, the same jobs run faster, etc.). In many cases, this cost efficiency has allowed customers to move additional use cases to Snowflake (likely eliminating costs elsewhere) that they couldn't before. When customers are happy with a platform, and they think they are getting business value out of it, they prioritize moving more workloads to that platform.

[tonydoberman]

This is a really good video, good conversation and discussion in the comments too

[HassanDibani]

just a note about Redshift, it was nothing but a lift and shift of Paraccel database. it was not a cloud native database to start with.

[remioyediji]

You have so much knowledge, please stay on one tone so one is not distracted

[elprofesornet]

Great video! Are you planning to make a video about Microsoft Fabric?

[pain-free-it]

Long time follower on Medium but somehow didn't know that you had a YouTube channel. Thanks, subbed!

[robbyrob]

Hey Ben, any thoughts on Synapse? It rarely gets mentioned.

[niberius]

Snowflake’s introduction of the Snowpark Python API might just change the game 🤔

[marcosferreira]

I think snowflake is a great solution, but it is still somewhat expensive, specially for small or medium-sized companies that can´t afford a huge budget for their IT processes. Databricks is running outside, as I can see, but it is also a expensive tool.