Snowflake is kicking off this year’s Cloud Analytics City Tour with a blow out event in London, England. This will be a full day workshop style event where you get to hear and learn from industry veterans and thought leaders like myself, and the CEO of Snowflake Computing, Bob Muglia (to name just a few). In addition we will have a Practitioner Panel discussion that includes several of our customers along with other industry thought leaders.
The unique value proposition for this event is that in the afternoon you can choose from two tracks of in depth sessions related to implementing your BI solutions and your data warehouse in the cloud.
I will be presenting my talk Agile Methods and Data Warehousing: How to Deliver Faster. My highly seasoned colleagues from Snowflake (all industry experts) will teach you about loading data in the cloud, deploying BI in the cloud, and how to best use Snowflake to be successful with your cloud analytics program.
And of course there will be food, drinks, and networking.
You can find all the agenda details here along with the registration form. Use discount code DATAWARRIOR for 50% off the registration fee. Sign up today!
This will be my first time ever in London, so if you are in the area, please come by, say “hi” and learn about the new world of Cloud Analytics.
Until then, cheers!
Kent
The Data Warrior
P.S. I will be in London the day before and after the event, so if you want to have a more detailed or personalized discussion of the benefits of cloud-native data warehousing, please reach out to me at kent.graziano@snowflake.net.
Snowflake Computing is making great strides in the evolution of our Elastic DWaaS in the cloud. Here is a recent update from engineering and product management on our integration with Spark:
This is the first post in an ongoing series describing Snowflake’s integration with Spark. In this post, we introduce the Snowflake Connector for Spark (package available from Maven Central or Spark Packages, source code in Github) and make the case for using it to bring Spark and Snowflake together to power your data-driven solutions.
Next up on the Data Warrior speaking schedule is the St. Louis SilverLinings event on May 2nd. It will be held at the St. Charles Convention Center, St. Louis, MS.
This promises to be a very exciting event boasting “edgy” and forward looking technical topics. It’s going to be a very busy day for me with three talks in total on some of my favorite topics.
Big Data. NoSQL. The Cloud. Self-service<whatever>.
And Cloud Data Warehousing.
Some of the offerings and solutions are real. Some less so.
Newest on the scene is cloud data warehousing (or data warehousing in the cloud). As with all new tech, there are a variety of offerings out there with different characteristics. To help folks try to understand the space a bit more, the company I work for (Snowflake Computing) put together a (hopefully) hype-free, vendor agnostic book on the topic called Cloud Data Warehousing for Dummies, which I blogged about last month. If you have not already gotten a copy and read it, I encourage you to do so soon. I think you will find it very helpful in the coming months as this topic heats up.
It is where data warehousing is going. Period.
But is Cloud Data Warehousing really for real?
I may be biased here (okay, likely), but based on my experience working with Snowflake for over a year now, I have to say yes. Emphatically, yes!
Cloud Data Warehousing is real. It can handle real data and real workloads. To the tune of hundreds of terabytes and even petabytes of structured, and semi-structured, data, all for a fraction of the cost of traditional on-premises data warehouse solutions, and with the ease of administration you expect from a cloud-based SaaS solution.
But, as they say, the proof is in the pudding!
So here are a few proof-points for you from real, live customers, who have been using Snowflake to improve their business outcomes.
AthenaHealth
AthenaHealth is a leading healthcare services provider (with a network of 85,000 providers and 83 million patients nationwide). So yes, it is possible to have a cloud data warehouse that is secure enough to pass HIPAA regulations for holding PHI (Personal Healthcare Information).
In this video, Adam Weinstein, Executive Director of Analytics & Data Science explains how AthenaHealth leverages the Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse service to radically accelerate their reporting with real-time updates, more advanced analytics, and machine-learning, while minimizing overhead and maintenance.
Some of the key benefits AthenaHelth experienced using Snowflake:
Ability to work with petabytes of healthcare data
Ability to scale to meet analytic needs both internally and externally
Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than other options
Ability to support machine learning-based products
Reduction in overhead maintenance thanks to the Snowflake service offering
Says Adam:
What I see Snowflake enabling us to deliver to our clients, internal stakeholders and paying customers will be pretty freaking cool!
Iovation
Iovation is the leading SaaS provider of fraud prevention and multifactor authentication solutions. So needless to say, they know security and they feel very secure with their data in the cloud.
In this video, Kurk Spendlove, Director of Engineering, shares why they switched from Vertica to the Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse service in order to load semi-structured data directly into the cloud data warehouse and analyze years of data in a matter of minutes.
Some of the key benefits Iovation experienced using Snowflake:
Ability to load semi-structured data directly into Snowflake
Loading schema-less data – not having to modify schema every time data is changing in new weekly releases
Ability to scan through years’ worth of data and having the report back in minutes
Powerful support for new machine learning-based products
Minimize management for data warehouse and overhead
Kurk says:
I’m a big fan of Snowflake and the people behind it.
Rue La La
Rue La La is a flash sale site with over 18 million members looking for great deals on designer fashion and accessories.
Director of BI and Data Warehousing at Rue La La, Erick Roesch says:
Snowflake’s separation of compute and storage is just revolutionary!
In this video, he explains how they replaced their legacy data warehouse and Hadoop data lake with a Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse to merge data sources for fast, data-driven business decisions.
Key benefits Rue La La saw from switching to Snowflake:
Merge different data sources for data-driven insights- 360-view of their customers!
Better targeted marketing and promotions to Rue La La members based on their personalized preferences
Better purchasing decisions for Merchandising and planning dept – they can learn more about context of the product, avoid having residual inventory of things that don’t sell
All data in one place in real time– internal and external data feeds (demographic, census, geo-location data)
No admin and infrastructure costs
Streamlined development cycles -traditional development activities and processes become very simple
Sharethrough
Sharethrough is the leading global native advertising (adtech) platform. In this short video listen to the Head of Analytics, Joseph Bates, explain how they were able to drastically reduce query times, streamline complex processes, and build new data pipelines by switching from MySQL to the Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse.
Some key benefits Sharethrough saw from using Snowflake:
Reduced query times from hours to seconds (before, basic queries took an hour to return)
Streamline complex processes with minimal cost
“Query that used to take an entire weekend & $1,200 of compute time to run, now in Snowflake runs with bare minimum ETL, 4 lines of SQL in 30 seconds.”
Minimal database administration
Joseph’s conclusion:
The next step will be to see how we can build new data pipelines and meet the demands of our business, and I think Snowflake is unparalleled in this regard.
Cloud Data Warehousing is not just hype
Hopefully you can see by the passion and excitement from these customers, that it is not all hype. The promise of the cloud combined with a next-generation SQL-based data warehouse engine is in fact delivering the goods.
I am even more excited about the possibilities now than when I joined a year ago. It is awesome to see what these, and other companies are doing to transform their businesses and really challenging the status quo of in not only the data warehousing arena, but big data as well.
Cloud data warehousing is a game changer.
Maybe we can have it all?
For even more exciting customer stories check out the Snowflake channel on YouTube.
If this tech excites you too, please share on social media with any and all who love data and want to change the story for enterprise data warehousing! And don’t forget to follow Snowflake on twitter @snowflakedb for more customer success stories, upcoming webinars, and product announcements.
As we all know, cloud is the big thing these days. Getting bigger everyday it seems.
It may get even bigger than Big Data!
If you, like me, are a data warehousing or BI professional, you have probably been wondering how this all fits in the cloud world. You may have even heard of data warehousing “in the cloud”.
But what does that really mean? What is a cloud data warehouse?
Well thanks to Snowflake Computing, it just got a little easier to answer this question.
They sponsored the development of a new book called Cloud Data Warehousing for Dummies. Yup, an actual Dummies guide for this. And yes, yours truely, got to have a hand in editing and writing the book.
Researching and helping to write the book was very educational for me. I learned a lot in the process about what constitutes a cloud data warehouse, the difference between a platform in the cloud and a real service in the cloud, and what characteristics folks should look for when choosing one.
I also learned to say “on-premises” instead of “on-premise.” 🙂
Content
The chapters of the book cover:
An introduction to cloud data warehousing
Why the modern data warehouse emerged
The criteria for selecting a modern data warehouse
On-premises vs cloud data warehousing
Comparing cloud data warehousing solutions
A six-step guide to choosing a cloud data warehouse
It also includes several real-world customer case studies.
Even though Snowflake sponsored the book, it is vendor agnostic. It really is a book designed to get you introduced to the concepts and to get you thinking about what you might want in a cloud-based data warehousing system.
It is ideal for anyone who is considering making that transition to the cloud.
So head on over to this site and download your FREE copy today!
To infinity and beyond!
Kent
The Data Warrior (with his head in the clouds)
P.S. Forward this to a friend so they can download a copy too!
RT @Data_Rebels: The most recent two meetings of #DVNAUG were a two-part webinar focused on end-to-end Data Vaults Done Right, presented by… 19 hours ago
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