During the London Tech Week, four Business Data Partners consultants took part in the London Tech Week WhereScape & Snowflake Hackathon. The task? Build an automated cloud data warehouse in three hours. BDP consultant Nathan Mukhtar shares his experience of the Hackathon and the tools used.
London Tech Week
The Hackathon was hosted as part of London Tech Week, a week-long festival of tech and innovation, with over 55,000 attendees visiting over 250 events across London. Snowflake and WhereScape teamed up to host the hackathon event, where attendees learnt, built and showed off their skills using both technologies. Together these tools provided the perfect environment for the BDP consultants to show their stuff through building an automated cloud data warehouse.
The Main Event
In total this was a five-hour workshop, where the team learned how to create a data warehouse using WhereScape connected to Snowflake – helped along by lots of beer, unlimited beer actually. This provided an opportunity to see how powerful and easy to use both products are, albeit in a controlled environment with clean data.
Snowflake, cloud-based SaaS database, seems like the answer to the main problem developers face every day: lack of space. Running on top of AWS or Azure, Snowflake and uses an elastic architecture being able to spin computing power up and down at will, only charging profit for the computation time used. Any storage used is charged at the cloud vendors cost thus extremely cheap. Seemingly reliable, fast, cheap with scalable space and performance, it would be interesting to see it working in a real-world scenario.
WhereScape, a Data Warehousing tool with a ton of automation built in, also looked great and easy to use. This automation element is executed very well and doesn’t force the user down a specific route as sometimes automation may do. WhereScape has an intuitive interface, granular control where needed, automated construction of warehouses through only a handful of clicks, and automated documentation from data dictionary to lineage – simple yet time saving! As WhereScape can connect to any source, this is an exciting tool with a lot of potential. Another one our team is keen to get a hands-on experience. WhereScape was very easy to pick up, especially if you were already familiar with DWH concepts.
The event wrapped up with a competition to complete as many tasks as possible using both Snowflake and WhereScape within an hour. Our very own Julien coming second taking home £200 in amazon vouchers!
This was a fantastic event where we had the opportunity to get hands on experience with two powerful tools that we can already see applications without our current projects.
Business Data Partners are committed to continuously expanding our knowledge and technical capabilities, including adopting new and emerging technologies to meet the needs of our clients. If you would like to know more about the technologies Business Data Partners use, or if you’re interested in partnering with us, get in touch today.
