# S4 E2: Byte: NFTs, Snowflake and Aggregators

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2024-04-22
- **Format:** Video · 58 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Industry trends, Data engineering, Tool strategy
- **Tools:** Databricks (notebooks, spark); Power BI; Snowflake (time travel, warehouses); Tableau
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/s4-e2-byte-nfts-snowflake-and-aggregators
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGNAgpLZvio

In this Datum Podcast episode, Ravi and I dig into three connected topics: what non-fungible tokens really are and where they might add genuine value, why Snowflake is finally having its moment as a cloud-native database, and how the rise of de-aggregators like Databricks fits into a world dominated by AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Along the way I admit I'm finally going to learn Power BI for myself.

## Key takeaways

- NFTs are best understood not as today's art-trading speculation but as a mechanism for adding provenance, traceability and credit to digital and creative work over the long term.
- Snowflake charges for compute (via a credit system measured in roughly 60-second blocks) rather than storage, so the right cost comparison is a full year of 24/7 use against a traditional database, then halving it for realistic usage.
- Snowflake works on a metadata layer, leaving the underlying data unchanged, which enables features like querying a database as it looked up to 90 days in the past.
- The real catch with Snowflake is that you must change how you think about pricing and ROI, which is exactly why adoption took years.
- Databricks and similar de-aggregators win by being cloud-agnostic and compatible with many tools and languages, rather than trying to be a single all-in-one platform like Salesforce's walled garden.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Catch-up and training fatigue
- 2:13 BI tool analogies and learning Power BI
- 8:39 NFTs and digital provenance
- 20:53 What Snowflake actually is
- 33:15 Snowflake's customer roll-call
- 37:52 Databricks and de-aggregators
- 41:35 Cloud platforms and the Salesforce question

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/s4-e2-byte-nfts-snowflake-and-aggregators

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena