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SG Mir's avatar

Oracle had much of the same thinking as far back as 20+ years ago (maybe more, but I wasn't around then...). So if we're on making comparison, I think the right comparison is that we're seeing the next iteration of Oracle's proprietary in-database products.

The question is how open will that implementation be? And will apps built for Snowflake work on GCP, AWS stacks? I suspect no. In the end, I am not sure this is as exciting as it sounds. I think we're just looking at a proliferation of in-database functionalities that are required for a mature enterprise database product. And the standard there for decades has been Oracle.

What we're actually probably going to see is a few iterations of implementations with relatively open standards. Something that will give Snowflake's competitors their own good ideas to make in-database app products. Then competition on in-database apps kicks off, and Snowflake will start making decisions. towards making App implementation much more proprietary, using custom languages totally incompatible with anything else.

I think the more interesting future is emergence of another Streamlit, but one like DBT that is able to raise >$300mil and build an an entire cloud platform around the idea of community contributed apps. That would be an interesting future.

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Ernest Prabhakar's avatar

Maybe what we really need is new “atomic unit” of data. Not tables. Not dashboards. Not even apps. Let’s call it an INS (for insight, insert, or inside joke). A true Data OS would make it easy for humans (or machines) produce, consume, and reuse INS without having worry about the complexity of formats, compute, or even platform.

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