Frank Bell - Snowflake Essentials: Getting Started with Big Data in the Cloud

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In 2010, Marc Andreessen wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal titled Why Software Is Eating the World as many brick-and-mortar businesses were being disrupted by digitally native firms like Amazon, Uber, and Apple. The pace of disruption has accelerated further as organizations have embraced a data-driven approach to transforming businesses. Data has become central to transforming how companies interface with their customers, suppliers, and partners, find new ways to generate revenues, create new ecosystems, and improve operational efficiencies.

Data is now used in innovating almost every aspect of life, such as new drug research, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, adjusting insurance claims, creating art and music and the list goes on. Data has become so pervasive that the best way to describe this new world is that Data is feeding the world. The recent COVID pandemic has also necessitated that companies move their apps and data estates to the cloud. The combined data and cloud trend has given rise to a new breed of data platforms that enable enterprise initiatives to become data-driven. One such popular data platform is Snowflake a platform that has taken the industry by storm since its unprecedented IPO in September 2020.

This is a timely book on the Snowflake data platform that covers the essentials as well as some expert topics such as data architectures. Frank, Bjorn, Raj Chirumamilla, Sameer Videkar, Bhaskar Joshi, and Ruchi Soni are top experts in Snowflake and have packed this book with stellar content on Snowflake and how to use it effectively.

The authors have become deep Snowflake experts and have been working extensively on Snowflake for many years. They have helped build Snowflake consulting solutions that have helped numerous Snowflake implementations and clients. Frank, in particular, has been immersed in Snowflake since the beginning of 2018. He transformed his previous big data consulting business to become one of the key Snowflake implementation partners before being acquired by Accenture.

This book will help data professionals learn all the essentials around the Snowflake Data Cloud. It also covers some of the transformative Snowflake architecture and features in depth such as data sharing. My favorite chapter in the book is Chapter on data sharing, exchanges, and marketplaces. It provides an insightful look at how data sharing is transforming the evolution of data collaboration to digitally transform businesses.

Shail Jain