Moving to the Cloud — Professionally

Go cloud or go home. It’s the message we’ve been hearing for at least the last 5+ years in the IT world. Cloud is the next big thing, so important that a few years ago even Oracle decided to join the movement. I’m in total agreement. The strengths of cloud based data and applications include separation of storage and compute, automatic (and simple) scalability, and low maintenance. All leading to lower costs.

About the same time that Oracle was starting to talk about moving to the cloud, I heard about a new data warehouse that was built from the ground up, entirely for the cloud, called Snowflake. A friend from the conference circuit, Kent Graziano, had just joined the San Mateo, CA based startup and his tales describing how this data warehouse in the cloud worked seemed too good to be true. Automatically scaling compute to handle the biggest, baddest queries. “Time Travel”, allowing users to read a consistent state of the entire database at any point in time. The ability to spin up multiple data warehouses on top of the same data, without copying any data. Wow! I thought. This sounds awesome…but will it work?

Fast forward a couple of years and Snowflake Computing has taken off like a rocket. The “too good to be true” data warehouse in the cloud is exactly what large and small enterprises want (based on the growing customer list). Snowflake has been on many “best places to work” lists and is continuing to grow by leaps and bounds. And…

I’m very excited to be starting at Snowflake as a Senior Solutions Architect on Monday!

I’ll be getting back into the data warehouse world, plus I have the chance to work with some great, brilliant folks that I’ve known for years in the Oracle space. I look forward to helping Snowflake clients as they make their move to the data warehouse built for the cloud. Let it snow! ❄️