The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Comparing Snowflake to a Car

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Vinoo Ganesh of Bluesky Data.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we give you a preview of the show that we just recorded. Costas, this was a really interesting one. And I'm going to actually bring up something that's kind of a teaser, but the car analogy to me was super interesting, where the driver is someone writing a SQL query, and the car is all of the other variables within Snowflake that contribute to the sort of conditions for performance, that SQL query. And Venu from Blue Sky walked us through that. Tell me, did you think that was a good analogy, a helpful analogy? Yeah. Yeah.

I think it was great. I think it's really difficult for anyone to grasp, let's say, the complexity of this infrastructure and how much it affects, let's say, the organization. Because if you think about data in a company, something that's used by pretty much everyone, this happens through the data infrastructure that you have. And yeah, it's really, really hard to optimize it or figure out what optimization means at the end,

who you optimize for, and how is the SLA defined, what is cost, what is performance. And there are so many levers there, which at the end, yeah, makes a lot of sense that you have products at the end, like Blue Sky, but they do exactly that. And I have a feeling we will hear like more and more about like this kind

of like products in the future. So yeah, I would recommend to everyone like to listen to these episodes. It's going to be like super useful for anyone who's working in like maintaining data infrastructure. I agree. Okay. Here's another really important question. When you open Snowflake and start writing SQL,

do you feel like a competent driver that is keeping the roads safe? Do I? I mean, I don't know. What kind of car do you think you're driving? Is it more like a Ferrari or it's more like a Toyota? Do I? I mean, I don't know. What kind of car do you think you're driving? Is it more like a Ferrari or it's more like a Toyota? I don't know. What's your feeling?

Does that impact how safe of a driver you are? I mean, okay, you don't always optimize for safety, right? There are times you optimize, like, for fun. What is that in Snowflake? A Ferrari is like an XL, and a Toyota is like an X-small? Probably, yeah.

Like a Prius is probably a X-small. The 5XL thing, probably, yeah, I don't know. It's the... That's a jet. That's a G6. That's a G6, yeah. Probably you need the same amount of money

to operate it. Alright, well, this is going to be a great episode because Kostas is doing the equivalent of flying a G6 when he opens up the SQL query editor in Snowflake. So definitely check this episode out and we will catch you on the next one.