back to article Snowflake doubters voice reservations over data warehouse's attempt to break into financial services

Cloud-based data warehouse darling Snowflake has launched its latest venture into financial services, while Teradata, something of a stalwart in data warehousing for banks and insurers, is attempting to broaden its appeal with machine learning implementations. Though the world has been focused on Snowflake's stratospheric rise …

  1. Mike 137 Silver badge

    "Snowflake doubters voice reservations ..."

    I completely misunderstood this headline - visions of hypersensitive folks questioning the ethics of data centres diversifying into financial services in general. That looked interesting, but when I read the piece is was about the technicalities of a specific data centre doing so, in which I wasn't interested at all.

    Fun headlines still need to impart a reasonably clear message. The classic of this questionable genre is probably the wartime (possibly apocryphal) one: "British push bottles up Germans" but there are thousands of them and the population is growing exponentially as everyone shouts for attention over the noise of everyone else shouting for attention.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My first and last experience with Teradata was back when they were building their boxes out of '386's. :)

    Compared to anything else I'd seen, it SMOKED!

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "It's the unpredictability of the costs"

    And how is it that the beancounters aren't up in arms about this ?

    Beancounters love it when the spreadsheet shows profits rolling in and costs tightly contained.

    Come to think of it, I don't much mind that myself.

    Anyway, bills are never fun, but unpredictable ones can really stick in your throat. And the bigger you are, the worse they can get.

    In-house. Yes, it's a hassle, but if you do it right, you have all the experience at your fingertips when things go wrong.

    And things always go wrong, in the cloud or not.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    >logistic regression model a data scientist had built in Apache Spark could be exported in the Predictive Model Mark-Up Language (PMML) interchange format...

    If you're working in the mid-2000s, maybe. Model interchange is in MLeap or framework-native formats these days. PMML produces hilariously large outputs for practical/modern models. Yeah you can compress it but if you're knocking out gigabytes of model parameters use a binary format please. Your future self will thank you.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My org is trying to use Snowflake, but I don't think it can match Vertica's performance. We've also seen unexpected cost spikes.

    Giving lower-skill users direct access to a pay-as-you-go system might not be the best.

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