Overview

He's back! For our February event, we are thrilled to welcome a special guest out of semi-retirement: John Ryan.
As a former Snowflake employee and current Data Superhero, John has been there since the beginning. In fact, he and I co-hosted Ireland’s first-ever Snowflake event. Since the venue was a converted church, we called it the "Church of Data." It was the perfect setting to kick off our Snowflake evangelism.

Abstract

Moving from on-premises data platforms to cloud isn’t just a technology change — it’s a cost and operating model shift. Many teams underestimate this and end up with performance issues, spiralling spend, or both.

This session explains why traditional on-prem thinking breaks down in Snowflake, how Snowflake is designed to scale, and where customers commonly go wrong.

Using real lessons from three large Snowflake customers, we’ll walk through:

What “scale up” really means in Snowflake (and when not to use it)

Three common mistakes that quietly drive cost and poor performance

What actually worked in production — not theory, not marketing slides

This is a practical, experience-based session aimed at engineers, architects, and technical leaders who want Snowflake to run faster without wasting money.