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by beefield 964 days ago
Sorry a small thread hijack. I may be considering returning to my previous employer who has since I left started using Snowflake. Is that unambiguously good or bad? If it can be either, are there some questions I should check? (As a background, I am quite happy writing my queries in SQL)
4 comments

As a data warehouse it’s great. It’s not a complete solution for an analytics platform. Snowpark seems are bolted on and doesn’t really benefit from the core engine. It’s reporting capabilities are a bit weak. So you’ll probably want some external BI tools and/or tools like R and Python if you’re heavily into analytics.
“It depends”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Snowflake. But like any database it has a time and place.

In my experience it excels at the stated use case of OLAP in the cloud with compute separate from storage and claim it's unambiguously good for this.

For OLTP it would be unambiguously bad (although maybe there's hope with Unistore, which I haven't tried.)

Many workloads are a mix and so it can become ambiguous whether it's a great fit / great value / whatever you're defining good/bad-ness by

We're building our entire company almost exclusively on the Snowflake stack. The fact that that is possible, definitely shows you how Snowflake has evolved from just a "warehouse" to a Data Platform (or Data Cloud to use their terminology).

The Marketplace, Streamlit, and Native Apps stand out as particularly cool/useful.

More than anything, just the completeness of the platform (ie. data quality tools, governance, etc.) is super helpful to not have to cobble together.

The AI features they announced today also seem game-changing.

Of course, full diclosure, they are my lead investor but I chose to work with them for these reasons.

I'm quite interested in your consumer spending data. Are you able to share what the underlying source/partner is?
Also - wanted to ask about the nominal value projections for market share. Do you some how normalize or weight/calibrate this data? Thanks
Shoot me at email at alex.izydorczyk@cybersyn.com