Please join me on March 30th at 11AM CDT for my first official post-retirement talk!
I will be chatting with Mike Lampa from Great Data Minds about my career and plans post-Snowflake. I expect we will cover a wide range of topics including what community and technical evangelism is all about, as well as what made me jump from nearly 30 years in the Oracle world to a small startup with less than 100 people that claimed to have re-invented data warehousing in the cloud.
Shortly before leaving Snowflake last year, I was interviewed for this post about one of the worst case examples of data siloes I had seen – we called them data puddles!
A few years ago, Kent Graziano joined a big organization to work on its data. The first problem was that nobody really knew what and where all the data was. Graziano took his first three months on the job investigating data sources and targets, ultimately creating an enterprise data map to illustrate all the flows. It wasn’t pretty.
“In the end, I discovered that the same data was being sent to three or four places,” he said. In one case raw data was transformed and stored in a data warehouse, then moved from there into another warehouse—which was also pulling in the original raw data.
Graziano, who recently retired from his post as Chief Technical Evangelist at Snowflake, said this scenario is entirely common. Data scattered and copied in lakes, warehouses, data marts, SaaS platforms, spreadsheets, test systems, and more. That’s mass data fragmentation, or, more colloquially, data sprawl or data puddles.
Indeed, 75% of organizations do not have a complete architecture in place to manage an end-to-end set of data activities including integration, access, governance, and protection, according to IDC’s State of the CDO research, December 2021. This lack of governance combines with legacy systems, shadow IT, and good intentions to pave the road to a lot of fragmentation.
Check out the rest of the post to learn how data sprawl hurts businesses and what to do about it. Read it all here!
After six years and one month as the global evangelist for Snowflake (and almost 40 years in IT), I’ve decided to slow down and begin easing into retirement. As such, today is my last day at Snowflake.
I loved the Snowflake product so much that I gave up independent consulting to sign on (as employee 105) with this scrappy little startup in Silicon Valley (my first) and take a chance. Now at the end of 2021, the product is even more amazing than when I started and with #TheDataCloud it is changing the world of data.
The people and culture established by the founders, Benoit and Thierry, along with the leadership of Bob Muglia, Denise Persson, Chris Degnan, and Frank Slootman, have made this the best job (and longest) of my career. I cannot imagine a better way to bring this chapter to an end.
Thank you, Benoit and Thierry, for your vision and for inventing a new architecture for databases.
Thank you, Kyle Rourke and Todd Beauchene for introducing me to this amazing technology at that tiny meetup in Denver. Know you changed my life!
And finally, thank you Francis Mao for your incredible artwork (above) and especially for my Data Superhero uniform and avatar. The #DataWarrior never looked better!
It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with Snowflake from startup thru hypergrowth to the largest software IPO in history! What a wild and adventurous ride it has been. And I know the team will continue to go far and continue to disrupt the way we manage and get value from data long into the future (I am counting on it…after all I am a shareholder too!).
By now you surely know that you can build a Data Vault on Snowflake. In fact we have many customers doing so today. So much so that we formed a Snowflake Data Vault User Group.
Over the years I have had hundreds of calls and meetings with organizations around the world discussing this topic from just basic Data Vault 101 type questions to best practices to who is doing Data Vault on Snowflake. Because of that we developed a Data Vault Resource Kit that points you to all the key blog posts, videos, and customer stories on the topic (scroll down to see everything!). Be sure to bookmark that page. Most of your questions on this topic can be answered there.
To take it a step further and to a deeper level, I partnered up with Snowflake Field CTO Dmytro Yarashneko (CDVP2) and wrote a post with reference architectures and discussions related to doing real time feeds into a Data Vault 2.0 on Snowflake. Check that out here. This article even has code!
And, at long last, for those that want to jump in feet first and try it for yourself, the team built a Data Vault Quickstart , based on the above article and a hands on lab from WWDVC 2021, that gives you a step-by-step guide and all the code to build and load a Data Vault 2.0 system, including an information mart on top of the Data Vault, all in your very own Snowflake account.
So, what is your excuse now? You have all the resources you need to give it a go!
And please, bookmark this post and/or the links above so you don’t lose them!
Last week I had the privilege of being interviewed by Nick Heudecker (former Gartner analyst and current Senior Director at Cribl) for the Data Mesh Learning Community. In our interview, we covered the idea of empowering business domains to really own and manage their data via things like templates and a center of excellence, not to just give them the responsibility of owning their data and leaving them to figure the rest out on their own. We also discussed the need for organizations to focus on investing in growing a data culture, not just investing in the newest cloud based tooling. Really, how do we lower the barriers to accessing, sharing, and leveraging data and get people to really think about data-as-a-product.
Like Agile before it, Data Mesh is as much about changing the way an organization thinks and works as it is about technology. I argue that the people and organization aspects of adopting a data mesh approach are more important than the technology aspects. Without the right approach, the best technology (like Snowflake), is not going to solve your organization’s data problems.
See the full interview here:
So what do you think about all this data mesh stuff?
Cheers!
Kent
The Data Warrior
P.S. For much more on the thoughts about #datamesh, check the other podcasts and videos listed on my Snowflake Resources page.
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