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than consuming from Snowflake, something to be kept in mind when addressing client
expectations. Regardless of how clients source your data products, you must deliver a
consistent experience across all platforms.
Let’s look at the client perspective: your clients want highly performant data
products delivered in their specified consumable formats to their operating locations
within agreed timeframes. Increasingly, your clients are becoming more aware of their
dependence upon your ability to serve data products in a resilient manner. No consumer
should be forced into invoking their disaster recovery process as a consequence of
provider infrastructure failure. You must insulate your consumers as much as possible.
You must consider that your data product offerings are one or more data source
ingestion boxes within your client’s architecture diagrams. In other words, your data
products may not be central to your client’s business; there are plenty of competitors out
there, and your approach must align with your clients’ requirements.
Companies do not build data products speculatively. The available evidence proves
that “if you build it, they will not come.” Internal organization data product consumption
is a side benefit. While notable exceptions exist (such as COVID-19 data), the typical
purpose for building data products is for generating revenue for your organization.
When viewed from a client perspective, you must deliver against their requirements
and consider yourself a valued contributor to their success. Your value-add must include
data dictionaries, catalogs, and entity-relationship diagrams to inform clients of entity
relationships, business keys, and technical keys. Furthermore, if your organization
provides multiple data products, you should demonstrate where the data models
intersect as this may lead to up-sell opportunities.
When provisioning shares, there is no additional cost to adding multiple accounts
within the same CSP and region. For example, let’s assume a client has three Snowflake
accounts on the same CSP and region, one each for development, testing, and
production. Enabling the same share for consumption by all three accounts is a simple
operation; you would enable all three accounts to reference the same read-only data
in a consistent manner. Sometimes clients want to use the same data for testing as
they would in production. No more copying purchased data sets from a single share to
multiple accounts. I do acknowledge there may be usage license implications for the
additional service provision. Making the same shares available removes the need to copy
data, reduces your client costs, and provides an up-sell opportunity for additional user
licenses.
Chapter 9
Client expeCtations