(calm music)
>> Welcome to theCUBE's live coverage
of Snowflake Summit '22 from Las Vegas,
Caesars Forum.
Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante,
we're going to unpack some really cool stuff next,
in the next 10 minutes with you,
Carl Perry joins us,
the Director of Product Management at Snowflake,
he's here to talk about Snowflake's new Unistore workloads,
how it's driving the next phase of innovation,
welcome to the program.
>> Oh, thank you so much for having me,
this is awesome.
>> There's a ton of momentum here,
I saw the the numbers from fiscal 23Q1,
product revenue 394 million,
85% growth,
a lot of customers here,
the customer growth is incredible as well,
talk to us about Unistore,
what is it?
Unpack it
and how have the customers been influential
in it's development?
>> Yeah, so Unistore is a way for customers
to take their transactional workloads,
for their enterprise applications
and now have them run on
or be built on top of Snowflake
and now, you have your transactional data,
along with all of your historical data,
so now you have a single unified platform
for doing anything you need to do with your data,
whether it's transactional,
single row look-ups,
we can do that,
whether it's the analytical data across again,
transactional and historical data in a single query,
our customers are super excited about this.
>> So, what are Hybrid Tables?
Is that just an extension of external tables?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
So, Hybrid Tables are a new table-type
that we've added to Snowflake
and Hybrid Tables are really kind of just like another table
with a couple of key differences,
so number one is that Hybrid Tables provide fast,
fine-grain read
and write operations,
so when you do something like a select star from customers
where customer ID=832,
that's going to return extremely fast,
but on top of that same data,
your transactional data,
you can actually perform amazing analytical queries
that return extremely fast
and that's what Hybrid Tables at their core are.
>> So, what does this mean for,
so you're bringing that world of transaction
and analytics together,
what does it mean for customers?
Walk us through Carl,
an example of-
>> Yeah, so it's great,
so Adobe is a customer that is looking at using
and leveraging Hybrid Tables today,
and then more broadly Unistore,
and frankly,
Adobe has been an amazing customer
since they started their journey,
just really quickly,
they're in phase three,
the first phase was customers had data in Snowflake
that they wanted to take advantage
of with the Adobe Campaign Platform
and so what they did is they built a connector
basically into
and being able to access customer data,
and then they started to look at,
"Well, this thing's working really well,
let's try to leverage Snowflake
for all our analytical needs."
And so that was kind of phase two,
and now phase three is like,
look let's go
and reimagine what we can do
with the Adobe Campaign Platform
by having both the transactional
and analytical data in the same platform,
so that they can really enable their customers
to do personalization,
ad campaign management,
understanding the ethicacy of those things
at a scale that they haven't been able to do before.
>> Prior to this capability,
they would what?
Have to go outside of the Snowflake Data Cloud?
And do something else?
And then come back in?
>> Exactly, right?
So, they'd have a transactional system
where all of the transactional state
for what the customer was doing inside Adobe Campaign,
setting up all their campaigns
and everything,
and that would be stored inside a database, right?
And then they would need to ensure that,
that data was moved over to Snowflake
for further analytical purposes, right?
You know you imagine the complexity
that our customers have to manage every single day,
a separate transactional system,
an ETL pipeline to keep that data flowing
and then Snowflake, right?
And with Unistore,
we really believe that customers will be able
to remove that complexity from their lives
and have that single platform
that really makes their lives easier.
>> I mean, they'll still have a transactional system,
will they not?
Or do you see a day where they sort of sunset that?
>> I mean, there's a set of workloads
that are not going to be the best choice today
for Unistore
and Hybrid Tables, right?
And so we know that customers will continue
to have their own transactional systems, right?
And there's lots of transactional systems
that customers rely
and have entire applications,
and systems built around, right?
Right now with Hybrid Tables
and Unistore,
customers can take those enterprise applications,
not consumer-facing applications
and move them over to leverage Snowflake,
and then really think about re-imagining
how they can use their data
that's both realtime transactional,
as well as all the historical data
without the need to move things between systems
or use a ton of different services.
>> The Adobe example that you just gave seems like,
I loved how you described the phases they're in,
they're discovering,
it's like peeling the onion
and just discovering more,
and more,
but what it sounds like is that Snowflake
has enabled Adobe to transform part of it's business,
how is Unistore positioned to be so transformational
for your customers?
>> Well, I mean I think there's a couple of things,
so one, they have this like level of complexity today
for a set of applications
that they can completely stop worrying about, right?
No need to maintain that separate transactional system
for that again,
enterprise application,
no need to maintain that ETL pipeline,
that's kind of like one step,
the next step is,
I mean all your data's in Snowflake,
so you can start leveraging that data for insight
and action immediately,
there's no delay in being able
to take advantage of that data, right?
And then number three,
which I think is the most compelling part
is because it's part of Snowflake,
you getting the benefit of Snowflake's entire ecosystem,
whether it's first party capabilities like easy to manage
and enforce really powerful governance,
and security policies, right?
Being able to take data from the market place
and actually join it with my realtime transactional data,
this is game-changing
and then most importantly
is the third-party ecosystem of partners
who are building all these incredible solutions
on top of Snowflake,
I can't even begin to imagine what they're going to do
with Hybrid Tables in Unistore.
>> So, Carl I have to ask you,
so I talked to a lot of customers
and I talked to a lot of technology companies,
explain, so Snowflake obviously was the first
to separate compute from storage
and you know the cloud,
cloud database
and then tons of investment came into that space,
kind of follow you on,
so that's cool,
you reached escape velocity,
awesome, but a lot of the companies
that I talked to are saying,
"We're converging transaction
and analytics,"
I think (speaking softly) calls it HTAP or something,
they came up with a name,
explain the difference between what you're doing
and what everybody else is doing,
and why,
what customer benefits you're delivering?
>> Yeah, so I mean I think that's a really great question
and to use the term you used HTAP, right?
It's a industry understood term,
really when people think about HTAP,
what that is about
is taking your transactional data that you have
and enabling you to do fast analytical capabilities on that,
and that's great,
but there are a couple of problems
that historical HTAP solutions have suffered from,
so number one,
that acceleration,
that colander format of data is all in memory,
so you're bound by the total amount of memory
that you can use to accelerate the queries that you want to,
so that's kind of problem one,
this is not the approach that Snowflake is taking,
most importantly,
it's not just about accelerating
queries on transactional data,
whether it's a single-row lookup
or a complex aggregate,
it's about being able to leverage that data
within the data cloud, right?
I don't want to have a separate dataset
on a transactional system or an HTAP system
that can give me great analytics on transactional data
and then I can't use it with all the other data that I have,
it's truly about enabling the transformation
with the data cloud
and completely taking away silos,
so that your data,
whether it's realtime,
whether it's historical,
can be treated as a single dataset,
this is the key thing that is different about Unistore,
you can take the power of the data cloud,
all of it,
all of the partners,
all the solutions
and all the capabilities we continue to add,
and leverage your data in ways
that nobody's thought of possible before.
>> Governance is a huge,
huge component of that, right?
So, in the press release,
you have this statement,
"As part of the Unistore Snowflake is introducing
Hybrid Tables,"
you explained that,
"Which offer fast,
single-row operations
and allow customers to build transactional
business applications directly on Snowflake"-
>> Yep.
>> That's a little interesting tidbit,
so you expect customers are going to build
transactional applications inside the data cloud?
And somewhat minimize the work that is going to be required
by their existing transactional databases, correct?
>> Exactly and I think,
so let me say a couple things on this, right?
So, first of all,
there's a class of applications that will be able
to just build on top of Hybrid Tables
and run on Snowflake directly,
for their transactional needs,
I think what's super interesting here though
is when you again start to talk about all your data,
one example that we're going to walk through tomorrow
in our talk is being able to do a transaction
that updates data in a Hybrid Table
and then updates data in a Standard Snowflake Table,
and then either being able to atomically commit,
or rollback that transaction,
this is a transaction that's spanning multiple
different table types inside Snowflake
and you'll have consistency of either the rollback
or the commit,
this type of functionality doesn't exist elsewhere
and being able to take,
and build transactional applications
with these capabilities,
we think is transformative-
>> And that's all going to happen inside
the Snowflake Data Cloud,
with all the capabilities
and it's not like you know
what you're doing with Dell
and Pure,
it's nice,
but it's read-only,
you can't you know add
and delete,
and do all that stuff,
this is Native?
First class citizen inside the database?
>> Yep, just like other table types,
you'll be able to take on
and leverage the power of the data cloud
as a normal table that you'd be able to use elsewhere.
>> Got to ask you,
your energy in the way that you're talking
about this is fantastic,
the transformation that it's going to be,
how central it is to the product innovations
that Snowflake is coming out with,
what's been the feedback from customers?
As there's so many thousands of folks here today,
the keynote was standing in your room only,
there was an overflow,
what are you hearing on the floor here?
>> Well, I mean,
I think it was funny in the talk
when I announced that primary keys are going to be required
and enforced,
and we got a standing ovation,
I was like,
"Wow, I didn't expect people to be so excited
about primary key enforcement."
I mean, what's been amazing both about the private preview
and the feedback we're getting there,
and then some of the early feedback
we're getting from customers
is that they want to understand
and they're really thinking about like,
"Wait, I can use Snowflake for all of this now?"
And honestly I think that people are kind of like,
"But wait, what would I do if I could have
those applications running on Snowflake
and not have to worry about multiple systems?
Wait, I can combine it with all my historical data
and anything that's in the data cloud,
like what can I do?"
Is the question they're asking
and I think that this is the most fascinating thing,
customers are going to build things
they haven't been able to build before
and I'm super excited to see what they do.
>> But more specifically,
my takeaway is that customers,
actually application builders are going to be able
to build applications that have data inherent to those apps,
I mean John Furrier years ago said,
"You know data is the new development kit."
And it never happened the data,
the data stack if you will separate
from the application development stack,
you're bringing those two worlds together,
so what do you think the implications are of that?
>> Well, I mean I think that we're going to dramatically
simplify our customers lives, right?
A thing that we focus on at Snowflake
is relentless customer innovation,
so we can make their lives better,
so I mean frankly we talk to customers like,
"Wait, I can do all this?
Wait, are you sure that I'll be able to do this?"
And we walk through what we can do,
and what we can't do,
and they really are like,
"Wow, this could just dramatically simplify our lives
and wait, what could we do with our data here?"
And so, I think with the announcement of Unistore,
and also all the Native app stuff
that we're announcing today,
I think we're really trying to enable customers
and app developers there to think about,
and being able to leverage Snowflake
as their transactional system,
the system of source,
so I mean,
I'm super excited about this,
I came to Snowflake to work on this
and I'm like,
"Can't believe we get to talk about it."
>> How do you,
how, how?
How does this work?
What's the secret sauce behind it?
Is it architecture or is it?
>> Yeah, so I mean I think a big part of it
is the architecture that we chose,
so you know number one,
a key product philosophy that we have at Snowflake
is we have one product,
we don't have many,
we don't put the onus of complexity onto our customers
and so building that into Snowflake is actually really hard,
so underlying Hybrid Tables,
which is the feature that powers Unistore
is a row storage engine,
a row-based storage engine, right?
And then data is asynchronously copied
over into a colander format
and what this provides,
because it's just another table
that's deeply integrated with Snowflake
is the compiler's completely aware of this,
so you can write a query that spans multiple tables
and take advantage of it,
and we'll take over all the complexity,
whether it needs to be a fast response
to a single-row lookup,
or it needs to aggregate
and scan a ton of data,
we'll make sure that we choose the right thing
and provide you with the best performance that we have-
>> You built that intelligence inside of that?
>> Completely built in
and amazing,
but provided in a very simple fashion.
>> You said you came to Snowflake to do this?
How long ago was that?
>> I came here a little over a year
and a half.
>> Okay, and had they started working on this
obviously beforehand,
or at least envisioning it, right?
>> Yeah, this I mean,
this is absolutely incredible,
I have been working on this now for a year
and a half,
some of the team members have been working on it for more
and it's incredible to finally be able
to talk to customers
and everybody about it,
and for them to tell us what they're trying to do.
I've already talked to a bunch of customers like,
"Well wait, I could do this,
or this,
what about this scenario?"
And it's awesome to hear their requirements, right?
The thing that's been most amazing
and you'll hear it in the talk tomorrow with Adobe
who's been a great customer is like,
"Customers give us insanely hard requirements."
And what I love about this company is not,
"Well, you know it's easier to do it this way."
It's like,
"No, how can we actually make their life easier?"
And so, we really focus on doing that with Snowflake.
>> And that's one of the things
Frank talked about this morning
with that mission alignment being critical there.
So, it's in private preview now,
when can folks expect to get their hands on it?
>> Well, we don't have a date right now we're talking about,
but you can go signup to be notified
of the public preview when we get there,
I think it's like snowflake.com/try-unistore,
but we'll publish that later
and you know if you're interested in the private preview,
talk to your account team
and we'll see if we can get you in.
>> Carl, thank you so much for joining Dave
and me in an action-packed 15 minutes,
talking about the power of Unistore,
what it's going to enable organizations to do
and it sounds like you're tapping the surface,
there's just so much more innovation that's to come,
you're going to have to come back.
>> Yes, that sounds awesome,
thank you so much.
>> Our pleasure.
For Carl
and Dave Vellante,
I'm Lisa Martin,
you're watching theCUBE's live coverage
of Snowflake Summit '22 from the show floor in Las Vegas,
we're going to be right back with our next guest.
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