by Matt Springfield | June 12, 2024

Key Takeaways from Snowflake Summit 2024

The CData team had a fantastic time at Snowflake Summit 2024, which concluded in San Fransico last week. Almost 20,000 data engineers, architects, and enthusiasts clamored around the Bay Area, eager to participate in a vibrant conversation about data storage, data movement, and AI. Within the Moscone Convention Center, many hundreds stopped by the CData booth to discuss data warehousing and connectivity challenges and learn more about how CData can make their lives easier.

We had great conversations, wandered the massive ‘Base Camp’ expo hall, taught and learned, explored the city, and relaxed with partners and friends in the cool Californian evenings. Let’s talk about it!

Tune in to the data talk on the show floor

As always, the highlight of the experience for us had to be the conversations we shared with hundreds of show-goers at the CData booth in the expo hall. At CData, we can support nearly any strategy for solving data warehousing and connectivity challenges, so we love getting to hear the variety of opinions, challenges, and priorities that rest top-of-mind for our booth visitors when discussing data architecture and engineering.

Our booth headline invited a wide-ranging discussion: “How do you integrate with Snowflake?” After all, everyone knows that their data needs to get into and be accessible from Snowflake, but we like digging into the messy details.

We found that most people know of some way to ingest data into Snowflake, but those ways tend to be slow, expensive, or generally a bit of a pain. It was satisfying to see that CData Sync’s streamlined and scalable data replication provided an escape hatch for many beleaguered data architects and engineers.

Through our exploration of attendees’ needs and CData’s corresponding offerings, we found that a typical data architect’s gripe goes something like this:

“Yeah, we’ve got a data warehousing strategy, but man, it can get expensive to get data out of all our systems into Snowflake. Not to mention how annoying it can be to constantly re-engineer our ETL processes every few months as our data analysts’ requirements change.”

Luckily, we got to move past the griping phase into the dawning optimism as they realized that their job does not, in fact, need to be that tedious. Yes, at CData we can support data warehousing with a scalable pricing model and a system onboarding process that amounts to a few clicks.

We’d be remiss not to mention how important our live connectivity capabilities were to some attendees who are looking to buttress their warehousing strategy with real-time data access. This was especially true for visitors using SAP – it seems that data access challenges and SAP applications go hand-in-hand.

Chess robots, haikus, and bouncy balls – oh my

It’s always hard to pick favorites among the expo hall attractions, but the robot arms playing chess may take the cake. As a chess nerd myself (with a dreadful appreciation for chess-playing robots), it was awesome to watch the combination of technology and board games come to life.

Other booths offered a more artistic spin, inviting show-goers to write haikus about their favorite programming language. The clear favorite was Python, though there was not necessarily a correlation between Python ability and the appropriate 5-7-5 pattern of syllables. As for myself, I hastily scribbled an ode to C# (yes, I’m lame) and triple-counted the syllables in each line to be sure.

Expo halls are nothing without trinkets, and perhaps the most captivating for the CData team were light-up bouncy balls. While this might not speak well of our maturity, we had great fun returning to our childhood roots and reveling in the simplicity of ‘throw, bounce, catch.’ As usual, there was a high demand for socks and other booth trinkets.

As far as booth swag goes, CData’s own portable phone chargers were a big hit, especially as the hours and days wore on. Nobody wants to see that red battery icon in the top-right of your technological life-line.

Snowbash snowboarding

After work hours, the energy and excitement of Snowflake Summit 2024 held steady through a wide variety of conference events. Topping the list of the list was the Snowbash Party in the beautiful Yerba Buena gardens just across the street from the Moscone Convention Center.

With a live band playing generational hits in the background, data nerds feasted on an assortment of sliders and snacks while drinking local Californian wine. The competitive sort (myself included) rallied together for group foosball matches while the more tranquil souls relaxed on lawn chairs and plush recliners.

Perhaps most striking, a performer careened about high above our heads on a snowboard. No, really. Firmly affixed to the ground was a flexible pole about 15 feet high, and at the top of the pole was a snowboard with a (hopefully harnessed) rider using her balance and athleticism to bend the pole to her will. The result was rather surreal as we watched her whip back and forth like the Californian peaks had been reeled in to the cusp of the Bay.

Outside of conference-connected events, we enjoyed moonlighting around the San Fransico rooftop bars, indulging in fine dining experiences, and wistfully admiring the regal trolly running through the heart fo the city. Between the booth conversations, the expo hall attractions, and the evening revelry, it was a week to remember for the CData team.

Catch us in Europe soon!

As if cross-country flights weren’t long enough, the CData team is in Germany this week for TDWI Munich, and then Brussels, Belgium for Odoo Experience 2024. We’re excited to spread the word about CData Arc’s supply chain integration capabilities and how Odoo data can be accessed from any of your favorite data tools. Find us across the pond and say hello!

In the meantime, if you’re following up on conversations we had at the Snowflake Summit, feel free to play around with a free trial of CData Sync, your one-stop-shop for streamlined and scalable data warehousing with Snowflake.