Quick example: Detect written languages

Snowflake has made it really easy to create Java UDFs. You just need to do something like this:

create function add(x integer, y integer)
returns integer
language java
handler='Test.add'
as
$$
    class Test {
        public static int add(int x, int y) {
          return x + y;
        }
    }
$$;

Then you can use that function in your SQL statements:

select add(1, 3)// 4

That’s easy — and then the real power comes with the ability to load and use jar packages. For example, to detect written languages using Lingua:

create or replace function detect_lang(x string)
returns string
language java
imports = ('@~/lingua-1.1.0-with-dependencies.jar')
handler='MyClass.detect'
as
$$
import…

1. In 2011 there was a career path for me, but I had to leave Chile to find it.
2. There is a career path outside management: At Google I discovered that software engineers could keep moving forward without the need to become a manager.
3. There are jobs that combine passions with skills: I wasn’t the best SWE at Google, but someone saw my passions and skills, and invited me to join Developer Relations.
4. Know your strengths: Taking the Clifton StrengthsFinder test changed how I viewed myself. …

Have you tried renting a car lately? The rates are surprisingly high. And I have the data to prove it:

Each of these lines represents the average quoted price for car rentals in LA, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago, and San Francisco — starting in 2019, and ending in record high prices right now.

The highlight of this story is having access to all this data, and wondering what else you could do with it. …

The goal for this post is to build a function you could use within Snowflake to forecast time series. A great open source tool for this is Facebook Prophet, and we just need a way to use it within our Snowflake environment. This is easy, with Snowflake’s ability to run external functions — hence we only need to host an instance of Prophet and add the necessary plumbing to end up with a prophetize(timeseries) function within Snowflake.

Let’s start with a demo, any time series in Snowflake will do: For example, the temperature around New York City in the Newark…

Let’s say your customers are superheroes, and you have a table that contains data about them. You know a lot about your customers, and they trust you to protect their identities and privacy — not only from third parties, but also from people in your company that need this data to do their job, but not all of this:

Rotation in open source boards: Average # of years served by members

The ASF, PSF, and OSI keep renewing their board members. On average each member serves less than 8 years.

Meanwhile the FSF average # of years served per board members keeps growing — currently >13.83 years. Or more, if the count started before 2001.

Why boards should rotate

The following research articles show why institutions need to keep boards fresh, regardless if they are non-profit or not:

Rotating new board directors into the boardroom and on committees prevents the board from becoming stale. The IRS favors term limits because they believe that static board membership leads to unhealthy attitudes, which can cause boards to…

Eva Murray is a Tableau Zen master and a leader for #MakeOverMonday — and she just joined Snowflake! She loves data storytelling, and when she found thousands of datasets in the Snowflake Data Marketplace — she decided to take this challenge. We taped a call discussing her first 7 days of visualizations — and you can find it here:

Let’s check some of her visualizations and my thoughts:

The visualizations

Check TJ Murphy’s reaction when he discovered that Snowflake now has support for MATCH_RECOGNIZE:

Sample use case: Google Analytics e-commerce funnel with Snowflake

How would you answer this funnel question with SQL:

“We have an e-commerce shop. We need to identify sessions that land into the website from an arbitrary referrer (Instagram, Facebook, etc), and that end up buying something. How many steps did it take for these users to buy something, and how many times they tried to pay before success?”

That’s not an easy question to answer with plain SQL. But MATCH_RECOGNIZE finally gives us an elegant way to find answers to question like this one.

With MATCH_RECOGNIZE we can simply define the steps we…