What's so special about Snowflake?

Question

I have followed the technology industry pretty closely (or so I thought) for the last 20 years. When Snowflake had their IPO and the stock when through the roof, I was shocked.1. Because of the stock performance2. Because I'd never even heard of themFollowing the threads on HN, it seemed like a lot of other people were just as confused.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24265041https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494633https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24528742Can anybody explain it to me?

htrp · Accepted Answer

They have very good enterprise sales teams .....
They are also positioning themselves as a firm to firm data exchange hub (similar to how Zoom has positioned themselves as a universal firm to firm video conferencing solution) which allows them to capture a tax every time firms exchange data either externally or even internally (between various divisions).
Technically, I have heard despite their claims that they have a unique "cloud native architecture" [1], they are basically built on a custom distributed parquet system (Can't vouch for the accuracy of this).
[1] https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/intro-key-concepts....

nikonyrh · Answer

I really appreciate how they have separated the computational layer from data storage. Want to do a massive pre-calculation without disturbing others? Run it in a separate warehouse.
Also the underlying copy-on-write datastructure is a timesaver, you can clone (like taking a backup & restoring it but with a new name) a 100 GB database in a few tens of seconds or minutes. Also if you run an UPDATE and forgot to include a WHERE clause you can retrive the old data via time travel. You can execute queries directly to an older version of the table (or database) without having to restore it from a backup!
There is an about 500 ms overhead for each query, so it isn't suited for all use cases though.

pb77 · Answer

Snowflake separates compute and data storage which allows you to add more compute during busy times and switch to a lower compute during off peak times. It is also considered to be a data warehouse that is not from a cloud provider(even thought it uses AWS underneath and managed by snowflake).The company i work for use snowflake. Just like any cloud platform, you can run up the tab if wrongly configured and not optimized.

browningstreet · Answer

Good question, but I&rsquo;m often puzzled about how many things Snowflake doesn&rsquo;t do well, like DR&hellip;

sjg007 · Answer

It's a very easy to use and high performance with basically minimal management requirements.
You can also share your data not only across your company but with other snowflake customers with specific granular permissions.
It's amazing.

cityzen · Answer

https://www.freshpaint.io/blog/why-is-snowflake-so-valuable

bradwood · Answer

I've always thought their name was unfortunate. After all, Snowflakes are servers not managed with IaC.

alltakendamned · Answer

speculation.their balance sheet is painful to look at (479M sales and marketing costs for 592M revenue, ouch)

What's so special about Snowflake?

Good question, but I’m often puzzled about how many things Snowflake doesn’t do well, like DR…

It's a very easy to use and high performance with basically minimal management requirements.
You can also share your data not only across your company but with other snowflake customers with specific granular permissions.
It's amazing.

https://www.freshpaint.io/blog/why-is-snowflake-so-valuable

I've always thought their name was unfortunate. After all, Snowflakes are servers not managed with IaC.

speculation.
their balance sheet is painful to look at (479M sales and marketing costs for 592M revenue, ouch)

What's so special about Snowflake?

Good question, but I’m often puzzled about how many things Snowflake doesn’t do well, like DR…

It's a very easy to use and high performance with basically minimal management requirements.You can also share your data not only across your company but with other snowflake customers with specific granular permissions.It's amazing.

https://www.freshpaint.io/blog/why-is-snowflake-so-valuable

I've always thought their name was unfortunate. After all, Snowflakes are servers not managed with IaC.

speculation.their balance sheet is painful to look at (479M sales and marketing costs for 592M revenue, ouch)

It's a very easy to use and high performance with basically minimal management requirements.
You can also share your data not only across your company but with other snowflake customers with specific granular permissions.
It's amazing.

speculation.
their balance sheet is painful to look at (479M sales and marketing costs for 592M revenue, ouch)