The database is being unbundled. Traditionally, a database like Snowflake bought each knowledge storage & a question engine (& the computing energy to execute the question). That’s step 1 above.
However, prospects are pushing for a deeper separation of compute & storage. The current Snowflake earnings name highlighted the development. Bigger prospects desire open codecs for interoperability (step 2 & 3).
Plenty of massive prospects wish to have open file codecs to provide them the choices…So knowledge interoperability may be very a lot a factor and our AI merchandise can usually act on knowledge that’s sitting in cloud storage as nicely.
We do count on a lot of our giant prospects are going to undertake Iceberg codecs and transfer their knowledge out of Snowflake the place we lose that storage income and in addition the compute income related to transferring that knowledge into Snowflake.
As a substitute of locking the info in a single database, prospects desire to have it in open codecs like Apache Arrow, Apache Parquet, Apache Iceberg.
As knowledge use within an enterprise has expanded, so has the variety of calls for on that knowledge.
Somewhat than copying it every time for a special objective whether or not it’s exploratory analytics, enterprise intelligence, or AI workloads, why not centralize the info after which have many alternative techniques entry it?
This protects cash : Storage is about $280m-300m total for Snowflake.
As a reminder, about 10% to 11% of our total income is related to storage.
But it surely additionally simplifies architectures.
It additionally ushers in an epoch the place the question engines will compete for various workloads with worth & efficiency. Snowflake could also be higher for large-scale BI ; Databricks’ Spark for AI knowledge pipelines ; MotherDuck for interactive analytics.
Knowledge warehouse distributors have marketed the separation of storage & compute previously. However, that message was about scaling the system to deal with greater knowledge inside their very own product.
Prospects demand a deeper separation – a world wherein databases don’t cost for storage.
