Rise of the Data Cloud

by Frank Slootman, Steve Hamm

The Data Cloud was born from a bold disrupt 50 years of computing to mobilize the world’s data. Rise of the Data Cloud chronicles an idea that evolved into one of the biggest breakthroughs in modern technology. The Data Cloud brings organizations and their data together so the true potential of the data economy can emerge. Find out how your enterprise can join the Data Cloud and reap the previously unimaginable benefits of transacting with data, locally and globally. Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zukowski had a mission. As Snowflake’s founders, they wanted to make all types of data available to anybody with permission to use it via a simple and inexpensive mechanism. Their collective efforts drove the breakthrough creation of the Data Cloud. Snowflake’s Data Cloud platform ingests available data and transforms it into information. Without the ability to effectively process, data is just a collection of raw facts. If data can be managed, processed and organized, the resulting information can be harnessed to make data-driven decisions. Data Cloud allows organizations to fully automate many core business processes—making them more efficient, massively scalable, and less prone to error. Suppose you’re an IT manager responsible for managing data. Your frustrations with disconnected datasets, hardware storage constraints, lack of unique identifiers between multiple datasets, and access to analytics is making you and your organization less effective. This book will give you an understanding of what we’ve built to help you create a business with data as its most robust foundation. Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud — a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloes of data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single and seamless experience across multiple public clouds, helping power the data economy. Snowflake’s platform is the engine that powers and provides access to the Data Cloud, creating a solution for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Technology

159 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 8, 2020

Reviews

[Ravi Sharma · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just finished reading through the "Rise of the Data Cloud" kindle version.

It's a quick read, and here are my takeaways:

- First, it seems there is a rise of such books where CEOs hire freelance tech writers to publish books on their behalf while putting themselves as co-authors.
- The book starts by outlining how Snowflake began, where the founders and early investors came from etc. There are exciting nuggets if you enjoy learning about the early days of tech startups.
- It's very sales-y, putting Snowflake as the only cloud data platform worth considering with tiny details on why. There are no details on the internals on how is Snowflake's architecture different from other cloud data platform options out there.
- I have not used Snowflake, but I still enjoyed the narrative the authors painted around the data sharing capabilities and data governance. Again the underlying details on what makes that sort of data marketplace and data exchange possible are entirely missing.
- Some imaginative statements:
"a legacy data lake is too much like a real lake: murky."
"data catalogs are comparable to yesterday's Yello pages."
- Then there were several chapters in the second half of the book around data use-cases, basically a call to CIOs to leverage their data and drive business innovations.

If you are an engineer, then you might get bored mid-way due to a lack of internal details on the technology. Still, it's a short read and could be worth your time if you are looking for a lightweight introduction on Snowflake's rise as a company and a product than a study of cloud data platforms.

[JC · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I love Silicon valley start-up stories, and this one is unique in its own regard, this book ends up feeling more like a sales pitch from Snowflake. The book would have benefitted from a more independent perspective (like “the everything store”) and I would have preferred a lot more case studies, examples, and interviews with people outside the company.

[Teck Wu · Rating 3 out of 5]

First part of Snowflake’s rise and transition was interesting. The next parts on how Snowflake is leveraged — which I skimmed through — is very markety, but yes did learn some things.

[Minh · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I use their product at work, I was intrigued by the book and interested in learning about the company. The first chapters which deal with Snowflake's history are worth a read. The other chapters are pretty sales-y and outline how data can influence various industries now and in the future. If you work in data or follow it enough, those chapters can be easily and quickly skimmed. Would love to see more testimonials and anecdotes from 3rd party orgs or customers.

[Chris Finlayson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is more of a marketing document than a book about Snowflake. There are very few details about the company’s technology and how it works. The second half of the book is a series of marketing case studies. That said, Snowflake is an interesting company with big ambitions. I just couldn’t tell how much of the most interesting bits (the data exchange) was real behavior today versus something Snowflake hoped it’s customers would do if they got big enough.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book as an investor in cloud technology. While I am far from a data center scientist I found his use cases compelling and intriguing. I even began granting loans to women and minority owned businesses at home and abroad with the Kiva platform. I found the COVID-19 data relevant and compelling. The data sharing business is clearly in it's infancy. Self published via author house in Indiana.

[Wolfgang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Die vorderen 2/3 sind gut: Gründungserzählung und Geschäftsmodell. Daten sind das neue Gold, und in diesem Buch steht, wie man daraus Geld machen kann. Das hintere Drittel besteht aus der Beschreibung potentieller Anwendungen (sortiert nach Branchen), einer Success Story, und der Vorstellung einiger weniger Snowflake-Partner nebst deren (zukaufbarer) Dienstleistung. All das kann man auch auf der Webseite und in Hochglanzprospekten finden.

[Niklas Sävås · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book gives the reader a good view about Snowflake and the ecosystem around it. I think we will hear more about the company in the future. However, I generally don’t like business books that are written by an expert writer instead of the founder/operator and this was no exception. I ended up only reading it for the facts school-like.

[Joel-Oskar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great primer on the importance of cloud and data

This is primarily a book for executives considering a cloud data warehouse. It’s a bit salesy similarly to the Satya Nadella’s Microsoft book, but if you can look past that there are many things you can learn about what makes Snowflake so great and why data in the cloud is the future

[Murali Behara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books about Information Management Systems (IMS), or even about software packages are rarely illuminating, let alone engaging (unlike science writing)- this however is fantastic. The #TopView by CEO, Frank Slootman & the conclusion are a must read. The why (Data Cloud, particularly Snowflake) is in numerous use cases throughout the book.

[Irene Huang · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got educated on the importance of data, and how data improves people's life and productivity. For me, this is an educational book to keep track on the enterprise technology trend. Public cloud is here to stay, and cloud data warehouse sounds like a promising area to drive solution out of it for every industry and then touches everybody's life.

[Mark Beukeboom · Rating 1 out of 5]

A very American style book:
- Could’ve been written in less than half the pages.
- Repetitive in its statement.
- easy read (which is good)

Maybe my expectations were wrong. I wanted to learn about the technology of snowflake, but this was more about how awesome this company is.

[Gijs Koopman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book clearly explains the power of data for making business decisions and the role a cloud database should play in the process. At some points it feels like a Snowflake propaganda machine, would therefore give 3,5 stars

[Jaafar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird how I've been researching on Conversational AI and i just found troves on it in regards to banking, health and more. I mean Snowflake is a game changing behemoth. Capital One runs fully on the cloud tooo?!! Super insightful!

[3thn · Rating 4 out of 5]

first third of the book is a masterclass in enterprise ceo messaging

[Komsit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good history and overview of snowflake
A good primer if you want to invest in snowflake. The first 3 chapters are very good, the rest is not so useful.

[Doug Skinner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Includes decent go-to market strategy for enterprise SaaS.

[Anu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good content marketing from the Snowflake team

[Paweł Rusin · Rating 3 out of 5]

First part about the history of the Snowflake was slightly better. Second part about the data cloud was very generic and not that insightful. I was hoping for something more in depth.

[Matthew Mechtly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very heavy on the marketing side of things.

[Abdulmohsen Al-Sayegh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good concise disription

[Jackson Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gave me a great understanding of Snowflake, the gap in the marketplace that Snowflake filled, and a rudimentary understanding of data in a few specific industries.

[Graham Gnall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Work read. A few good chapters on the founding of Snowflake. The rest is, expectedly, a puff piece.

[M K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knocked off a star since too sales-y. As an engineer, wouldn't expect to pay out of pocket for marketing.

[Jerry O'Brien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Get ready for a rough but fun ride.

This is an easy read, full of good info. For me, it was a page turner. This truly reminds of the early 1980's and the switch to digital motor controls. There was so much hesitation to change. It was like not being able to see the forest for the trees.I look forward to watching the transition to the cloud.