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> Also, a mesh can add value as a unified access layer that proxies queries and applies data governance rules (e.g. sharing data, access control, column masking

> Also, a mesh can add value as a unified access layer that proxies queries and applies data governance rules (e.g. sharing data, access control, column masking, query whitelisting, rewriting, rate limiting, auditing, firewalling, etc.). It would be hard to do this in your warehouse, because as soon as you have another one, or there's some data that you can't ETL into it, you lose any benefits of its access layer. (e.g. Maybe you have two warehouses because you haven't fully migrated to one, or for cost reasons like storing FireBase clickstream data in BigTable that you can't move to Snowflake with the rest of your data. Now you need to maintain two sets of accounts and ACLs for each warehouse.). I have been actively championing this point of view for years but... I'm curious, are any paying customers actually interested in this? I don't know how you can market this successfully.

chatmasta 6y ago
We're really early and have done very little marketing outside of blog posts this summer, but we do have some paying customers. Their use cases are varying, since Splitgraph can serve a number of different functions (data catalog, data lake/mesh, query proxying/caching, versioned data snapshots, etc.). The common selling point across customers seems to be the integration of the access layer (Postgres proxy) and discovery layer (data catalog). Their data storage/access patterns are different. e.g. We have one who uses it as a data lake for periodically querying CSV files in a 20TB S3 bucket. But then another is more interested in the versioning features; they're building data images in Prefect workflows, tagging them with Semantic Versioning syntax, and pushing them to their Splitgraph deployment. For all of them, the discovery features of the catalog are important. We still have a lot of work to do on the ACL / governance features, but we've had prospects specifically ask about them as priorities. IMO, the best argument for our thesis is similar to GitLab's (unify the DevOps lifecycle). Even though GitLab didn't have the best-in-class version control or CI on their own, by offering them together they made it worth using GitLab. We want to unify the data stack by integrating the discovery, access and (optionally) storage layers. Even if each layer has some tradeoffs, the benefit of integrating them has a multiplicative effect on the platform itself.

chatmasta 6y ago

We're really early and have done very little marketing outside of blog posts this summer, but we do have some paying customers. Their use cases are varying, since Splitgraph can serve a number of different functions (data catalog, data lake/mesh, query proxying/caching, versioned data snapshots, etc.). The common selling point across customers seems to be the integration of the access layer (Postgres proxy) and discovery layer (data catalog). Their data storage/access patterns are different. e.g. We have one who uses it as a data lake for periodically querying CSV files in a 20TB S3 bucket. But then another is more interested in the versioning features; they're building data images in Prefect workflows, tagging them with Semantic Versioning syntax, and pushing them to their Splitgraph deployment. For all of them, the discovery features of the catalog are important. We still have a lot of work to do on the ACL / governance features, but we've had prospects specifically ask about them as priorities. IMO, the best argument for our thesis is similar to GitLab's (unify the DevOps lifecycle). Even though GitLab didn't have the best-in-class version control or CI on their own, by offering them together they made it worth using GitLab. We want to unify the data stack by integrating the discovery, access and (optionally) storage layers. Even if each layer has some tradeoffs, the benefit of integrating them has a multiplicative effect on the platform itself.