 Good early afternoon, guys and girls. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante of theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We are here, day one of our coverage of Snowflake Summit 2023 from Caesars Forum in Toasty, Las Vegas. Dave, we've been having some great conversations so far with the ecosystem, with customers. We've got SQL, DBM here. They're going to be talking about the world data modeling plays in modern data architecture. And they've got a joint Snowflake customers going to be really articulating the value that both companies are delivering. I'm excited about this. You too. Please welcome our guests, Serge Gurchkiewicz, product success lead at SQL, DBM. I hope I said that right. You nailed it. All right. You've been practicing. Well done. Jared Campbell is here as well. Chief Data Officer at PSL Group. Great to have you guys. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. Serge, give us the low down. I see the booth that's right over there. SQL, DBM, mission, vision. What do you guys do for customers? And then we'll dig into the partnership with Snowflake and the customer story. Sure, love to. SQL, DBM is an online database modeling tool. And very much in the ethos of Snowflake, cloud-based, cloud-first, cloud-native, what Snowflake is to databases, SQL, DBM is to modeling. And the vision is to tear down the barriers, make it easy, make it maintenance-free, self-hosted, nothing to worry about. All the updates are done by us. So if it's sounding familiar, you know where we took our inspiration. And the value proposition is exactly that. Snowflake changed the paradigm on what people can do with data, how data is used, how data is built. And SQL, DBM modeling drives a lot of the efficiencies of really planning out your Snowflake roadmap journey, getting the business involved, making it easy to access for non-technical users, kind of empowering the whole organization to interact with the data. No code. Absolutely no code. All the code is generated behind the scenes. Nice. Jared, talk to us a little bit about PSL Group. What is it that you guys do? What do you deliver for your customers? Yeah, PSL Group, we are a global organization dedicated at providing information at the service of medicine. The companies and people that make up PSL Group are prime objectives to improve medical care for those who need it, those that provide it, and those that are seeking to improve it. So our primary clients are going to be research-based pharmaceutical organizations and healthcare institutions that are seeking the advancement in the medical space. Jared, you've been a longtime user of SQL DBM. Thank you for correcting me on the name. Talk a little bit about what value does SQL DBM deliver to organizations because you've now had them at a couple of different companies. Yeah, I'd say that the big value is you can have a small team and deliver large assets when it comes to data modeling and architecture with SQL DBM. Being a SaaS-based offering, it allowed the first organization that I was at with a very small team to deliver assets at a rate that allowed the business to see the impact quickly versus utilizing an archaic or a more methodical approach that is known in the data modeling space. And so that's what really led our team to really adopt SQL DBM and be able to deliver value quickly. Can you take us through an example of how you would use this product and Snowflake? Is it a sort of a green field application? Is it an integration? Give us a typical example. So typical example, say if I'm new to Snowflake, I don't have any database tables or models, you're able to go through and build from scratch. SQL DBM allows you to establish your relationships between entities and go through and really build that visual representation of data. So your conceptual, your logical, and your physical design, and then allow you to also push that out to your target database being Snowflake. Now, if you're an existing Snowflake customer, you have the ability to reverse engineer what you already have. And so if you don't have a modeling platform or if you're looking to switch, they allow you to go through and reverse engineer your ecosystem, establish those relationships, and really get the business involved in the actual design of how data will be used across the organization. So sir, explain how this would work pre-U and what you bring to the table and how the process is different. Sure. Database modeling is actually founded in relational database design, which is as old as relational databases, of which Snowflake is one. So it goes back to the 1960s, like that's how old we're talking about and it then ties into mathematical theory. What we're really delivering is a visual approach that does away with all of the fancy stuff. At the end of the day, it's columns, column types, tables, relationships, but the pre-SQL DBM, pre-cloud, meant having to do this, maintain a server somewhere on your organization, maintain hardware, maintain a server side application that needs to be patched, that needs to be upgraded, and anyone who wants to do modeling then needs a client, a desktop client. They were clunky, they were Windows 95 looking contraptions, which, again, once you've got it installed, it does a fine job of doing the modeling. But unfortunately, it's sitting there on your desktop. You cannot call a colleague over and just share with them exactly what you've designed. And database modeling at its end stages is a very technical process. However, in the inception, I would say mostly business-driven. So it's never meant to be isolated on some data architect's desktop or somewhere on a server where a typical business user can't just get a picture, which is really what they're looking for, an image, something visual, something interactive, and that's what SQL DBM has enabled, which Lisa, by the way, you're not wrong. You've just waited into the age-old SQL or SQL debate. You've chosen a side and I support that. That's kind of what we're bringing to the table. By making this visual, by making it easy to access, not only have we made modeling easier, but we've unlocked the world of possibilities for the business. Things like governance, database documentation, which to them just looks like a web form. They don't even know they're generating code behind the scenes. They don't need to know, they don't want to know. And that's what we're most proud of. It didn't take a lot to convince the technical guys of how to do modeling properly, they already know. We're just making it easy for them. And by getting the business engagement, it props up the value of modeling within the organization. Now that people have literally a map to their data, they're able to do more with it in Snowflake because they can find it, they can relate it, they can associate it. My experience with data modeling has been historically, it happens in a vacuum, it gets thrown over the fence, sometimes, or implemented, and then that's the version of throwing it over the fence, and then it doesn't work as planned, and then there's a lot of back and forth. Kind of like DevOps was set out to solve that problem. How has this new approach, has this new approach changed? I mean, you talked about getting involved with the business right up front. Maybe you could describe that a little bit. So the biggest thing is, when it from architecture standpoint, you hit the nail on the head, right? Usually the architect is building it in a silo. There's little business involvement, and the outcome doesn't necessarily solve the business problem that they're initially put in front of them. So getting the business involved in the actual design sessions, and making sure that, hey, we're actually solving the business problem from a data standpoint, that's when it actually will persist longer and not have it to where your model becomes stale, and it's no longer providing the value to the business that you were initially seeking. So one of the key features that sets SQLDB apart is that they actually have CDIC integration with Git repositories. So if you have CodeCommit, if you have GitHub, you can actually set up continuous integration pipelines. So as your architect is making changes, your business can actually experience that live in the account. So you can actually reduce the time to deliver architectural changes when in the past it was very methodical and very large to go through and deploy these changes. Say if you're looking at some of the other platforms that are out there. So faster time to market. How does that help customers of PSLDB? You've talked about the healthcare vertical. I'm imagining like life and death situations are really emergent or whatnot. Talk to us about that. Yeah, so you need to keep pace with the business and because once you are not able to do that, the business loses sight of the actual value of what that data is actually providing to the organization. So whether if it's new policies that are being passed that you need to go through and hear by, if you're a need to establish lineage, say for new, I'd say acts that are being put in place such as CCPA, these additional legislation measures that you now you need to actually abide by. And so when you need to make those quick changes to be able to then meet those regulatory requirements, that's where you need to have that ability to be very agile and quick to deliver. I'm going through the business case here. So it's time to value. It's alignment with the business. It's the quality of the outcome, reduced rework. I might be somewhat double counting in there, but am I missing anything or how do you sort of frame the business case? By definition, a model is an abstraction. So if you're getting, let's say, your kitchen remodeled, someone would have drawn you a model of what they plan to do with it and then it's just a piece of paper. You say great, build it in real life. But what Snowflake has allowed us to do with their direct integration is we have the exact URL, the exact user that we can now connect directly and tear down the wall between abstraction and reality. So we're connecting in real time to Snowflake. We're getting the DDL, which forms kind of the most detailed version of our model, the data model. And then we're able to present that to the business at a simplified version. So you can always scale down. It's not so easy to scale up automatically. But when you can do that, it means you have one source of truth and you can speak to any part of the business. The tech side, the engineers, the analysts, down to the business users who, again, don't want to see all of the technical properties, just want to find their data assets, be able to add a little bit of context around them, provide the definitions, the business formulas, the governance team weighing in on the maturity level, the medallion status, et cetera. And it all happens on one source of truth. So just like we have integration into the tool, we have forward engineering back into Snowflake so it doesn't just sit with us. And as Jared was saying, it just keeps everyone happy. The CICD process goes through one touch point, hands off to get, lives within tools that people are already using in their data stack. And anyone can interface with this really at their comfort level and at their experience level as well. What has been the business impact, Jared, that you've seen? The biggest impact is, for me, I can actually have it to where I can sit down with key stakeholders. We can outline what is it that I'm missing today or what is it that you're trying to achieve and get to. And we can have that open conversation whereas in the past it was more kind of a closed door conversation. But you send me your problem, I'll try to solve for it and then I'll get 50% of it right. And so that collaboration is key. And so that's where I really feel that platform like SQLDB brings the business to the data and versus just having it being owned by technology. And so to be honest, that's the biggest value add for me is the open collaboration now that I'm getting my key business stakeholders involved in those data-driven decisions. As to what is it that they need to drive their own success. Has that been a cultural shift at PSL? Yeah, so over the last two and a half years, it's when I feel like when I joined, it's been a large shift towards reducing eliminating silos. And so you're not trying to deliver canned solutions that are only applicable to one portion of the business. It's taking a bigger approach so that when we are outlining a data asset, where else can this be leveraged and provide value than to just one team or to one business domain? We have over 50 different brands that we operate under. So there's a lot of shared information between our programs and so we want to make sure that we are delivering as much value with each data asset that we're delivering the first time. So the nature of apps is evolving. We've seen it. You just sort of described a surge of the, you buy a server, configure it up, get some licenses, some storage, those days are going to cloud change that. Do you think there's a day where we'll see, take Uber. Uber takes people's places and things and then codifies them and turns that somehow at the back end into something language that database understands. But we can sit there and call. And now Uber had to build this really complex stack to do that. Do you think the world of enterprise data will evolve to that kind of model? And what are the implications on modeling? Yeah, that's a great question. I think the one who cracks that nut is going to make a lot of money in the enterprise realm. But it goes back to being, as you said, data driven. It's not just about doing the operation. It's about automating it, bringing it into a common repository, iterating off of it, analyzing it in real time and driving decision-making, driving efficiencies that way. So luckily I'm not at that forefront of trying to really solve the Uber problem because at the very beginning of that journey is the fundamentals of what is a customer? What is a ride? What is an asset? Do we have Uber excels? Do we have regular Ubers? All of these are business operations. When you walk into a store, are you a customer or do you have to buy something before you're considered a customer? And that's not a technical question. This is something only the business can say, what do we consider a customer? What do we consider a user? Is a canceled ride, still a ride, et cetera. And all of these things can be taken out of the vernacular and put into semantics of something that both business teams and technical teams can agree on. It takes the ambiguity out of it. So in a way, our job is much easier because we're just implementing best practices that have, as I mentioned, been a part of the database world since there has been a database world. And we're letting people engage with that at the level of their expertise. And this way, no one is alienated and no one is misinterpreting anything. So that when people decide exactly, Uber's figured it out, but when the next company figures it out, it's not going to be in a boardroom. It's going to be driven by a model that the business has agreed on. Otherwise, even things like what is profit? What is profit before tax? What is a customer? These are things that people will just argue to death about until you can put it down in some kind of a model or semantics that everyone understands and finally sign off on. And as an example, you'd be essentially creating a digital twin of your business and translating that, like you said, with the semantic translation into, George calls it turning things into strings. That's a new world, Lisa. It is a new world. Jared, last question for you. What does the future look like for PSL with SQLDBM and Snowflake, especially with some of the things that Snowflake has announced in the last 12 hours alone? Yeah, no, I think with the products that they're continuing to add into the Snowflake stack and like the whole hybrid table, that's a game changer, right? That's bringing transactional and analytical layers together. So you're going to have speed of insight. So you're going to have not only the needs for warehouse and dimensional modeling just on the analytical side, but now you want to be able to model around transactions as well. And the closer that you get that information together, the faster that you can provide insight to the business. So you don't want to sit here and have to wait for data to go from one ecosystem to another to make a decision. The closer that those two get together, which they outlined today during the keynote, that they're making big strides in those hybrid tables, that that's where I think that you're going to see organizations really shifting to having all their information residing within one platform and Snowflake makes the most sense right now because of all the additional functionality and products that they're rolling out. A lot of functionality and a lot on the AI front. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about SQL DBM. Thank you for SQL, tomato, tomato. We appreciate that, but we also appreciate Jared, you talking to us about PSL Group and how you guys are leveraging the technology to really drive those business insights. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE up next. Cube alum, Rick Tam Daniels joins us from Informatica. Going to be talking about the eight plus year partnership Informatica and Snowflake have. Some big announcements Informatica made this week on SuperPipe for Snowflake, Generative AI. We're going to remind you that you can find all of our segments on Snowflake as well as all CUBE events at thecube.net. You're watching theCUBE, view leader in live tech coverage.