Author: Xin Wang
DFW Chinese IT Association (DFWCIA) successfully hosted a virtual seminar: “Winter is here, Introduction to Snowflake” on Jan 17th, 2021. Snowflake is a cloud-based data-warehousing company, and Snowflake IPO was the largest software IPO in history. Since many people work in the Cloud and big data field and more people are passionate about it in our community, we decided to host a tech seminar introducing Snowflake.
We have three sessions, the keynote speech, the Snowflake demo, and Q&A. Our keynote speaker is Frank Luo, the VP of the DFWCIA Education department. Besides his volunteer work in DFWCIA, Frank is also a director of engineering in Merkle, leading two customer data integration & master data management teams. Our assistant speaker is Edward Cui, the Director of the DFWCIA Education department. Edward also works as a data engineer in Merkle.
Frank has worked with Big Data for over 20 years, 4 years of experience with Snowflake. Not only does he have plenty of industry experience working on big data and Cloud, but Frank is also an experienced speaker. He gave speeches about Hadoop, Big Data, and Snowflake before. In today’s presentation, Frank first introduced the history of Snowflake, problems with the other data warehouse solutions, and the unique solutions that Snowflake provides to customers. Frank then dived deeper into Snowflake’s architecture, design concepts, macro-partition, time travel, and data sharing. As the presentation goes, Frank paused a few times to take questions and make sure the audience keeps up to his pace and gets a good understanding of the contents. After the presentation, Edward gave a demo about Snowflake, like creating tables by loading files, writing queries, cloning tables, etc. 92 people joined our seminar today. Many of them were actively interacting with the speakers by asking questions and exchanging ideas in the zoom chat. During and after the seminar, we got a lot of positive feedback recognizing Frank’s presentation and Edward’s demo. “Very informative speech!” “Terrific presentation!” “We learned a lot!” “Great discussions!” “Deep and detailed demo!”
In general, we had a great learning experience and are glad to provide such an amazing experience to the community! It’s a great start to the year 2021. We are looking forward to providing more exciting seminars to the community!