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by notacanofsoda 1564 days ago
Is this strange to anyone else? Streamlit and Snowflake occupy fairly different niches.
4 comments

I'm knee deep in the data tooling space myself and it's quirky at first but not too surprising.

This resembles the Google Cloud acquisition of Kaggle, or Microsoft's acquisition of Github. For better or for worse, these larger players / platforms are buying a large community around the hip tool. Snowflake wants to be a giant data platform company, not just "another data warehouse".

No stranger than Confluence acquiring Chartio. Snowflake has been making some interesting ventures and investments (eg Sigma Computing).

As a user of data tooling, bundling data pipelining, cloud warehousing, visualization, and MLOPs into a consistent environment is helpful and lowers tooling cost. Streamlit is frankly fantastic and one of my personal favorite tools.

Source: Myself, and I have family that run Datateer, an up and coming pipelining/analytics ops player in the space.

I think it’s more analogous to google cloud acquisition of Looker, rebranded as Google Data Studio
Would love to chat about data tooling!
Not really? Wouldn’t the streamlit app/notebook/editor experience compliment the snowflake data warehousing solutions well?
Yeah it definitely would. Historically, to OP's hesitation, databases & data warehouses haven't purchased BI tools, application layers, etc. But this is starting to change (e.g. Databricks bought Redash, an open source BI platform)
Databricks immediately comes to mind as well. When it's assembled right, it's a fantastic tooling.
I think it's a key area snowflake have been lacking. Built in nice dashboards that are as easy to throw together as a streamlit app would be a killer feature. Their lack in this area was a key issue for me.
It's very strange. There must be some vision to create a unified BI + Data Science platform but it's very pie-in-the-sky feeling to me.
True, I’d say that BI is saturated with a number of well built products, but perhaps the purchasers of those products aren’t fully aware of what’s available?
Yeah the market is super fragmented but enormous. Even huge players like Tableau have a small slice of the market. It's really wild-west feeling and no one is confident they know what they're doing when it comes to implementation/ops.
Does this compete with or complement their Snowpark feature?
Complement. Snowpark pushes compute to the SQL engine. That’s a better model for Streamlit’s dashboard code anyway :)