The Data Warrior

Changing the world, one data model at a time. How can I help you?

Archive for the tag “@SnowflakeDB”

Thank You Snowflake!

(Artwork by Francis Mao)

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!).

#LetItSnow

#OneTeam #OneDream

Kent Graziano

Chief Technical Evangelist (Emeritus), Snowflake

3 Key Resources for Data Vault on Snowflake

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!

Model on!

Kent

The Data Warrior

Data Mesh Learning – Interview with The Data Warrior

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.

Snowflake Launches Unstructured Data Support in Public Preview

This is great news that many of us have been waiting for! Now we can have all our data in one place.

From Day 1, Snowflake has supported structured and semi-structured data. Snowflake has provided exceptional performance for those data types and has been a pioneer in processing them. Today, Snowflake is adding support for unstructured data to allow customers to deliver more use cases with a single platform. The support for unstructured data management includes built-in capabilities to store, access, process, manage, govern, and share unstructured data in Snowflake. Now you can get all the benefits of the Snowflake Data Cloud with performance, concurrency, and scale for unstructured data.

Read to entire blog for all the details on how you can use this feature.  Unstructured Data Support in Public Preview

This really opens up a lot of new uses cases and makes doing analytics on unstructured data much easier.

Enjoy y’all!

Kent

The Data Warrior

Snowflake Resources from The Data Warrior

Since you are on this blog, I assume that means you are “following” me in that techie, non-stalker sort of way. 😉

That being the case you are aware of my tenure for the last 5+ years at the hottest data-focused software company in the world – Snowflake. And you know I have produced a lot of content (really – A LOT!). Everything from blogs to ebooks to videos to podcasts – in addition to my usual array of industry and Snowflake sponsored webinars and talks.

But if, like me, you have consumed so much content in the last year or so, you have probably lost track of some of it, right?

Well if you are trying to find something you saw me do (or tweet about doing) but just can’t remember what it was (or when or where) and you want to find it but don’t want to sift through the hundreds of Google search results or the thousands of social media posts I have done, look no further!

I decided to make it easier for you (and me frankly) by putting a pretty comprehensive list together on a permanent page here on my site.

I broke it up into videos/Podcasts, Thought Leader articles, ebooks, and blogs and have included links to all of these so you can quickly get to the content you need when you need it.

So check it out and bookmark the page now, before you forget or lose track of this post too. 🙂

You’re welcome.

Kent

The Data Warrior

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