Striking a balance with ‘open’ at Snowflake

At Snowflake, we believe in the value of open standards and open source, but also in the value of data governance and security; we believe in the value of ease of use, the power of community, and the value of abstractions that enable transparent optimizations and improvements over time. Some companies pride themselves on being open source, but their embrace is rarely 100%; as described above, there are good reasons for such departures. Our goal is to be clear and transparent about how we think about these topics at Snowflake and to dispel any myths and misconceptions.

We remain committed to open-sourcing components that get deployed in customer premises or security perimeters, and to import and export open formats. We remain committed to standards-based APIs and programming models. And above all, we remain committed to continuing to innovate and raising the bar of what’s possible in our industry.

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Benoit Dageville co-founded Snowflake and currently serves as president of the product division. Benoit is a leading expert in parallel execution and self-tuning database systems. Prior to founding Snowflake, Benoit was with Oracle for 15 years as a lead architect for parallel execution in Oracle RAC and a key architect in the SQL Manageability group. Prior to Oracle, Benoit worked at Bull Information Systems. He helped define the architecture and lead database performance efforts for Bull’s parallel systems. Benoit has a Ph.D. in computer science with a focus in parallel database systems and holds more than 80 patents.