Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions

2Develop Your Sales Strategy

“In those early days, we were intellectually honest with ourselves about what the product could do and how to sell it.”

—Chris Degnan

SNOWFLAKE WAS BUILT to do many things with data. One of those is data warehousing—a sector of the technology industry that emerged more than 20 years before Snowflake’s founders typed their first line of code. It was ripe for disruption, so they got working on a solution that was vastly different from our competitors’ legacy technology.

By the 1980s, companies were becoming more aware of the analytical insights trapped inside their databases designed solely for online transaction processing (OLTP). These solutions handled thousands of small data entries to add, update, and delete information each day. It all came from an organization’s sales, marketing, payroll, invoicing, purchasing, and inventory management teams, to name just a few. But when they attempted to analyze this information for business planning, their OLTP databases would slow or even crash. The analytical power needed pushed these systems beyond their limits.

At the time, the only way to get around this problem was to copy that data into a different type of database for analysis only. Hence, the online analytical processing (OLAP) database, or data warehouse, was born. Instead of millions of small updates to the data in OLTP systems, data warehouses were designed to handle incredibly large queries of the data in the warehouse. The insights derived ...