SNOW - Snowflake

[Castanza]

Thanks for that color (which I probably 50% understood).

 

Can you expand on MongoDB and its limitations and why more people aren't moving to that standard?

 

tldr; SQL db is still one of the better ways to keep data if it's organized and structure of data doesn't change a lot. Mongo is designed for less than structured data where you may not know what the structure is. Because you get the flexibility of handling data without knowing what data structure will look like, you lose the ability to do a lot of stuff that can be done in SQL-based dbs.

 

This is based on my work with Mongo few years back so things may have changed:

Basically, the way Mongo is setup it allows indexing but not really joins. It allows for faster queirs, but doesn't work if you need joins - basically connecting data across more than one table in the database. That makes Mongo not particularly useful for transactional (think logging of Visa transactions or something like that) systems. There is another concept in databases called normalization - basically, reduce data redundancy which improves a lot of things when it comes to data quality. Because MongoDB is a schema-less db, you can't do normalization so data can be total garbage if there aren't solid rules around ETL processing prior t pushing data into the database.

 

+1

 

The docs for Snowflake is a pretty good primer on what they offer and do.

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/intro-key-concepts.html#:~:text=Snowflake%20runs%20completely%20on%20cloud,for%20persistent%20storage%20of%20data.

[patience_and_focus]

Thanks for that color (which I probably 50% understood).

 

Can you expand on MongoDB and its limitations and why more people aren't moving to that standard?

 

tldr; SQL db is still one of the better ways to keep data if it's organized and structure of data doesn't change a lot. Mongo is designed for less than structured data where you may not know what the structure is. Because you get the flexibility of handling data without knowing what data structure will look like, you lose the ability to do a lot of stuff that can be done in SQL-based dbs.

 

This is based on my work with Mongo few years back so things may have changed:

Basically, the way Mongo is setup it allows indexing but not really joins. It allows for faster queirs, but doesn't work if you need joins - basically connecting data across more than one table in the database. That makes Mongo not particularly useful for transactional (think logging of Visa transactions or something like that) systems. There is another concept in databases called normalization - basically, reduce data redundancy which improves a lot of things when it comes to data quality. Because MongoDB is a schema-less db, you can't do normalization so data can be total garbage if there aren't solid rules around ETL processing prior t pushing data into the database.

 

This.

 

Also, in many industry problems where quality and traceability is important (most obvious example is healthcare), it is a very high burden to create and implement transaction processing rules that are rock solid. Oracle and other databases have evolved over decades to handle edge cases around complex transactions. Another important issue in such industries is transaction management with simultaneous users trying to update related set of data. A lot of companies that are starting data warehousing process do not have bandwidth (software/IT) to implement these from scratch around unstructured databases like MongoDB.

 

As for valuation, I am not sure if all this is worth 60B.

 

I personally know a lot of companies in healthcare where if cloud infrastructure is needed they either (a) go for AWS offering because it offers everything in a bundle for good enough price that there is no incentive to choose something piecemeal and new like snowflakes to save a few bucks and transaction efficiency. or (b) they contract out a lot of such work to third party software service providers (specialty software firms providing services to healthcare industry) who have team of software/IT experts. There the 3rd party may find it cheaper to use some combination of traditional SQL on a cheaper cloud server provider plus GCE/Lambda for compute to make the margins for themselves instead of giving it all to AWS/snowflakes.

[Castanza]

Thanks for that color (which I probably 50% understood).

 

Can you expand on MongoDB and its limitations and why more people aren't moving to that standard?

 

tldr; SQL db is still one of the better ways to keep data if it's organized and structure of data doesn't change a lot. Mongo is designed for less than structured data where you may not know what the structure is. Because you get the flexibility of handling data without knowing what data structure will look like, you lose the ability to do a lot of stuff that can be done in SQL-based dbs.

 

This is based on my work with Mongo few years back so things may have changed:

Basically, the way Mongo is setup it allows indexing but not really joins. It allows for faster queirs, but doesn't work if you need joins - basically connecting data across more than one table in the database. That makes Mongo not particularly useful for transactional (think logging of Visa transactions or something like that) systems. There is another concept in databases called normalization - basically, reduce data redundancy which improves a lot of things when it comes to data quality. Because MongoDB is a schema-less db, you can't do normalization so data can be total garbage if there aren't solid rules around ETL processing prior t pushing data into the database.

 

This.

 

Also, in many industry problems where quality and traceability is important (most obvious example is healthcare), it is a very high burden to create and implement transaction processing rules that are rock solid. Oracle and other databases have evolved over decades to handle edge cases around complex transactions. Another important issue in such industries is transaction management with simultaneous users trying to update related set of data. A lot of companies that are starting data warehousing process do not have bandwidth (software/IT) to implement these from scratch around unstructured databases like MongoDB.

 

As for valuation, I am not sure if all this is worth 60B.

 

I personally know a lot of companies in healthcare where if cloud infrastructure is needed they either (a) go for AWS offering because it offers everything in a bundle for good enough price that there is no incentive to choose something piecemeal and new like snowflakes to save a few bucks and transaction efficiency. or (b) they contract out a lot of such work to third party software service providers (specialty software firms providing services to healthcare industry) who have team of software/IT experts. There the 3rd party may find it cheaper to use some combination of traditional SQL on a cheaper cloud server provider plus GCE/Lambda for compute to make the margins for themselves instead of giving it all to AWS/snowflakes.

 

IT departments have been growing a lot at companies in general. There seems to be a bit of a trend where companies are building out their own servers, managing them, and even implementing their own private clouds. As the talent pool continues to grow this no longer becomes the out of reach rocket science it once was. Companies can internalize this and avoid the nickle and dime death of AWS. Obviously not every company will be capable of this. Snowflake currently does not offer anything proprietary that someone else couldn't do. Both Google Cloud and Amazon (Redshift) already offer similar products. Cloudera is a relatively similar company and they are nowhere near the current valuation of SNOW. Personally, I wouldn't buy at this valuation.

[patience_and_focus]

IT departments have been growing a lot at companies in general. There seems to be a bit of a trend where companies are building out their own servers, managing them, and even implementing their own private clouds. As the talent pool continues to grow this no longer becomes the out of reach rocket science it once was. Companies can internalize this and avoid the nickle and dime death of AWS.

 

Opposite seems to be the case in my experience in healthcare industry. Most healthcare companies are trying to focus on their core competence in what they do (diagnostics/making drugs/reagents etc) and do not have much competence in software/IT related issues. They also do not get the best of the breed because best in the breed of software/IT would not want to spend time in a company where the function is just a support function. There are of-course exceptions to that but these are relatively few. So healthcare companies are off-loading a lot of this to cloud providers and cut on "IT" costs (most IT costs for them is FTE in their IT departments).

 

Obviously not every company will be capable of this. Snowflake currently does not offer anything proprietary that someone else couldn't do. Both Google Cloud and Amazon (Redshift) already offer similar products. Cloudera is a relatively similar company and they are nowhere near the current valuation of SNOW. Personally, I wouldn't buy at this valuation.

 

Agree.

[fareastwarriors]

Was Snowflake’s IPO mispriced or just misunderstood?

 

 

https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/19/was-snowflakes-ipo-mispriced-or-just-misunderstood/

[fareastwarriors]

What's going on with $now?

 

 

[Guest roark33]

Seems like just low float, algos trading with each other.  Basically only 28m of 340-ish fully diluted shares are in the public float right now.  12/15 is first unlock date, with next one 10 trading days later and then full unlock 3/2-ish--whenever they release their second Q.