Climbing the Snowflake Summit
An overview on what happened at the Snowflake Summit 2022
After a 17 hours journey, I landed in the a hyper-reality glittering entertainment center in the middle of a desert, also known as Las Vegas. Coming from Melbourne at the time where it was our winter, Vegas was very nice and warm with a bit of Snow(flake) from Summit 2022.
Lodging
Many people stayed on the strip as it is close to the Summit which was held at Caesar Forum. There were plenty that stayed in Flamingo, Linq and Caesar Palace so it was likely that you would run into another Summiteer. Whenever I got lost, I just find those wearing a blue lanyard and just follow their direction, always end up where I want to be. Wifi was readily available at many hotels and restaurant on the Strip, and at the Summit itself.
Registration
Registration or check-in to the submit to get your lanyard and badge was held everyday, and also a day prior to the Summit at Caesar Forum. Walking into registration hall felt unreal as this was the first in-person Summit since pre-Covid. Everyone was happy and excited to be there so the energy was great. Though there were no Swags on registration, they did provide us all with a recyclable water bottle to keep us hydrated throughout the Summit.
The official day, the Keynote
The Summit served Breakfast and Lunch, plus afternoon snacks and drinks. On the Keynote day, I head over for a morning breakfast to kickstart my energy for all the announcements that was going to happen at the Keynote. Breakfast was nice and simple - pudding, toast, fruits etc.
Seating, disappointing arrangements
The hallway and entrance to the Keynote was roaring with Summiteers. Everyone was eager to get into the Keynote to watch it live. Though, a bit disappointing on the way the seatings were arranged as it was to fill the room from the most left side to the middle. If you were the first in line, you would be sitting on the most far left of the room with low visibility, whereas if you were last, you would be nicely seated in the middle.
The Keynote, an extravaganza
The Keynote hit it off with a blast with a sick beats from the DJ, safe to say, though I was still partially jet-lagged, I was still grooving.
Frank Slootman (CEO) was the first to show up on the stage providing details such as:
- More than 3990 employee
- More than 5900 customer base
- More than half of the fortune 500 are Snowflake customers
- Revenue growth to $1.2 billions from $ 96 millions in 2019
The disruption across the years — Benoît
2014 - Disrupt Analytics
2018 - Disrupt Collaboration
2022 - Disrupting Application Development
The 7 Innovation Pillars of Snowflake
- All data — Bring all data together, don’t re-silo your data. Mobilise the world data. 1550 as of FY22, Stable Edges, snowflake account and other institution. Data Sharing is an important concept in our future.
- All Workloads: Enable whatever you want to do.
- Global: Aims to be multi-cloud, cross cloud, allows data to be completely globalise. Have data where it needs to be.
- Self-Managed: Creating data platform that’s smart and able to manage itself. Snowflake wants to be a platform that allows you to just throw stuff at it and it will work
- Programmable: Engineering and Investment making Snowflake programmable, many connections and functions, ODBC etc
- Marketplace: Snowflake is a community. Marketplace is ability to access data from anywhere. Data provided in Marketplace.
- Governed: Center of Snowflake universe, secured etc. Bringing components into Snowflake in a fully governed matter.
There were many Announcements
Benoît Dageville, along with many other people presented many of the new enhancement and releases. I simplified all the announcements below.
Performance:
- Average of 10% faster compute on AWS and faster write-heavy workloads
- Search Optimisation now supports variant and text
- Search on maps are now 5x faster and Geometry support in preview soon
Platform:
- Resource group to manage resource and assign budget
- Account level and object (i.e Snowpipe) replication, including failover sync
- External tables can be used for on-premise data, and new support for Apache Iceberg
Ingestion
- New Materialised table which can be created on top of the stream. Able to update underlying logic as data arrives in near realtime.
Machine Learning:
- New extension for ML, able to call prediction directly using SQL
- New large memory warehouse to handle ML workloads
Data Experience:
- Data application can be built directly into Snowflake using Streamlit
Unistore:
- With the power of hybrid tables, transactional and analytical workloads can co-exist allowing for features such as low-latency lookups, enforceable primary key constraints, and indexing.
For more depth, check out Frank’s article
The Sessions throughout
Talks at Hero Hub
There were many great talks throughout the Summit. I had the opportunity to be one of the speaker where we discussed about all things Data Vault, Mesh, and Data Collaborations at the Hero Hub in the Expo Hall. I think it was great how talks here held there as well, people could roam around and chat to the different partners and within a few minutes, tune in for a quick talk on all things Data and Snowflake.
All things modern data
The Summit did amazing on gathering speakers from across many industries and covering different areas ranging from marketing through to marketplace monetisation. My colleagues Justin and Jas covered a great topic on Modern Data Engineer at Canva, outlining some of the techniques and pipelines we have to empower our analysts to make decisions with Data.
Under the hood of Snowflake
One of my favourite talks were around the inner workings of Snowflake features. I went to an interesting talk about how Snowpark is built behind the scene and it opened my eyes on the breakthrough that Snowflake engineers, PO, and teams, would have gone through in order to build the complete product that it is today. Permitting us to build programmable processes and machine learning pipelines in a single platform, and not in Silo elsewhere, risking data security.
Startup Challenge
Another interesting session I attended was the announcement of the Snowflake Startup Challenge where Benoît announced that Houseware was the winner of this year where they shared a vision of no-code data apps for everyone.
I loved the sessions
Overall, I really enjoyed the sessions and it was amazing to be able to network and connect with people, a good way to learn about how things can be done differently.
The downfall I found was that the there were plenty of people who could not get into many sessions because the room reached its capacity, maybe an overflow room to watch the live stream of it would be awesome for future Summits.
The After Parties
One of the thing I always look forward to is the after Parties, you know, a bit of reward for all the learnings that we had to do with sessions during the day😉. After parties were held at several locations on the Vegas Strip. Many Snowflake partners would arrange parties together for a spectacular show. My colleagues and I went to a few, guess you can say, party-hopped (or margarita-hoped).
Tao Beach Club — Margarita 1
Alation, Bigeye, and other Snowflake partners held a spectacular party at Tao Beach Club with countless of performers and drinks to go around. It was a great night and definitely lived up the the Vegas standard. They seem to know how to party so I got curious in the product offer and visited their booth the next day.
Mr Chow — Margarita 2
Atlan and other Snowflake partners held a party at Mr Chow. Though not as glamorous and spectacular at the one above, the food that went around was nicer. This party went till late so it was nice to be able to chat to many people throughout the night.
Snowflake Haus Party
The official after-party of Snowflake was held in a ginormous air-conditioned tent outside of Caeser Forum. There were many people there and it was packed. There were beers and shots going around, and different wonderfully taste hot dogs.
The Expo and Swags
There were over 200 partners at the Summit, all providing values to Summiteers in different ways. One common theme that I saw was the rise in partners that focus on observability and discovery (i.e Big Eye, Atlan, Soda, Select Star). I believe these are important area to building data maturity in many organisations, especially with the rise of data architectural concepts such as Data Mesh.
From Snowflake
Snowflake gave everyone either a choice of the mug or a hat, I chose the mug. If you’re a speaker at the Summit, they also gave out a speaker for Speakers. Some of the other Swags were available for grabs around the Hero Hub.
From Partner
As mentioned, there were various partners at the Expo. I picked up swags from Partners’ booth that I have an interest in or the products I use on a daily basis like dbt.
These are just some of the cool Swags at the Expo. I had a bit more but had already sent them out to my nerdy-data colleagues before taking any pictures.
Data Superhero fun things
While the various talks, sessions, expo, parties and swags were great, one of the best thing was to be able to meet my fellow Data Superheroes. Seeing everyone in person was a game of matching profile picture to real faces. Everyone was an MVP and it’s great to work with these awesome people on building a knowledge sharing community.
We had a lot of fun and a few of us even got together to save the world, Marvel, hit us up for future films. Be sure to check out the community.
Tips for future Summits
- Places may seem close on the maps in Vegas but they aren’t, bring comfortable shoes and be prepared to walk
- Vegas is hot and dry, bring sunscreen, moisturiser and definitely a chapstick
- Water is expensive at the hotel, $8–$12USD, and that’s a small bottle, head over to Walgreens or CVS
- When grabbing swags, make it a mission to get Small or Medium T-shirt first, they run out very fast
- If the Keynote seating in 2023 fills from left to middle, don’t be first in line, be last so you can get the middle seat and save your neck
- Line up at least 15–20mins before the session/talk starts so you can get a seat
My Ending thoughts on the Summit
It was more than just a tech conference, it was a gathering of many like-minded people. People I’ve met were either using Snowflake to power their analytics and business case, or building things for us to compliment Snowflake. Some were even people who wanted to see what Snowflake was all about and they were impressed.
We’ve all taken lots from the Summit, and these are valuable learnings that we can only get at the Summit itself. I can’t wait to see what next year summit holds. Though it was a long 17 hours journey for me, I know it will be a well-worth climb to the Summit in 2023.
Come along on the climb to the Summit with me next year 😊
About Me
Besides trying new fried chicken recipe, I love writing medium articles and contribute towards a knowledge-sharing community. Feel free to connect with me and say hi, and do let me know you came across my article, I really love that :)
