back to article Snowflake Q3 losses almost double, stock market flinches, then reckons: Nah, it's fine

Snowflake has reported its first financials since becoming a multi-billion dollar stock market darling, showing triple digit but slowing revenue growth in its Q3, and a near-doubling of losses. The response from Wall Street? Thumbs down. For the quarter ended 31 October, the cloudy data warehouse platform provider - which set …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They call the fucking company snowflake?

    Seriously?

    Cheers… ishy

    1. Steve Channell
      Meh

      Snowflake comes from the snowflake schema

      Star schema has already been optimized by cube OLAP engines, but for more complex problems Fact + Dimensions does not cut it.

      The idea of a snowflake optimizer is to join the smaller tables together before a full scan of the fact table. snowflake is good for translating a single SQL query into query steps for different stores, but struggles when a joins span multiple stores: a query of Score OR product OR customer OR region will die because of data distribution.

      The challenge for Snowflake is: (1) colocation of data is always better, (2) query optimisation is what RDBMS already do, (3) in the end, established vertically integrated RDBMS will be better (Oracle & SQL/Server already support Hadoop files).

      My bet is a Salesforce trade-sale

      1. Gunboat Diplomat

        Re: Snowflake comes from the snowflake schema

        The name isn't related to snowflake schemas which are a data warehouse anti-pattern. When I asked their sales team about that they stated the snowflake name was unrelated to snowflake schemas.

        It's a really nice piece of tech with some cool features but it's quite expensive for a lot of SMEs compared to say Redshift but highly competitive compared to Teradata etc

        1. Steve Channell
          Meh

          Re: Snowflake comes from the snowflake schema

          A snowflake schema is definitely a data-mart anti-pattern and often a data-warehouse anti-pattern, but poor support for update of columnar tables means it is still applicable for mixed-mode databases used for online/real-time lookup and analysis (especially when federated with the columnar store for history)

          Snowflake like products shine when the schema is complex because the domain is complex... if a sales-person tells you it was not named after snowflake schema, it is more likely because they're struggling to address complex use-cases.

          The pertinent data-warehouse anti-pattern is applying a meta-warehouse to a data-warehouse problem

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They call the fucking company snowflake?

      One of their products is called WOQE: web optimised query engine.

  2. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

    Would have been a nice long trade from mid Nov though from $245 - $335.

  3. hoola Silver badge

    $$$$

    So yet another company that has high revenue, mega losses but a totally insane share price.

    Have we not reached the point where all the ridiculous tech valuations are just total fiction buoyed up by moronic traders and venture capital. There must come a point where there is just not enough "money" in the system and the wheels fall off, you know a bit like the dot-com bubble. This will be worse as the amount of money involved is just so vast now.

    1. Loyal1

      Re: $$$$

      Are you suggesting that the Emperor is in fact naked?

      Agree with all of your points. South Sea Bubble 2.0 ...

  4. Fabrizio
    Devil

    Poor kids...

    That[the Snowflake book]’ll be waiting in the sack for this correspondent’s children’s sack this Christmas.

    Poor Kids!

    Reminds me of my godfather... (See icon)

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