KIXEYE Revamps Existing Data Architecture with Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse™

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KIXEYE Revamps Existing Data Architecture with Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse™

Video Gaming Leader Chooses Snowflake Computing for its Scalability and Elasticity, Saving Time and Money

SAN MATEO, Calif. – July 22, 2015Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, announced today that KIXEYE, a gaming company focused on mobile and online gaming markets, has deployed the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse™ to optimize its existing data architecture, relieve latency issues and reduce overall infrastructure costs.

KIXEYE develops high-quality, deeply immersive games for a worldwide audience. As a result, data analytics plays a key role at KIXEYE, supporting ongoing experimentation with new features, functionalities and platforms. KIXEYE captures data on millions of game events every few minutes and makes that data available to analysts for data exploration, predictive analytics and reporting. Using data helps KIXEYE make its games fun, interesting and profitable.

KIXEYE’s previous data architecture needed to evolve to meet its needs. It required multiple systems and a significant amount of ETL processing in Hadoop, which resulted in a system that had become overly complex, created significant latency from when data arrived to when analysts could access it, and became too expensive for KIXEYE to support. KIXEYE started looking for a solution that could handle the constant change in its data and do so without significant engineering overhead or operational cost.

KIXEYE deployed the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse to meet its data transformation and processing needs. Snowflake provided a far less complex solution, whose native support for semi-structured JSON data and unique ability to scale up and down on-the-fly to meet its demands, made a compelling combination.

“I can’t say enough about how fantastic the native JSON support is,” said Josh McDonald, director of analytics engineering at KIXEYE. “I’ve never actually seen anything that worked until now. Using SQL, Snowflake lets us load our JSON data as is, flatten it all out, load it into the event tables, and then parse that into views. My analysts are really happy about this.”

KIXEYE is also taking advantage of Snowflake’s elasticity to give each group the resources needed, without breaking the bank. Snowflake provides the ability to have a warehouse sized appropriately for processing all of KIXEYE’s loading of data and internal ETL, where each can happen in parallel so that its marketing, finance and gaming teams can be working at the same time without contention.

“Prior to using Snowflake, it was taking more than two hours from the time data arrived to the time that it was fully queryable. Additionally, we were constantly making sure Hadoop was doing the things that it needed to do and that data was being stored appropriately,” McDonald said. “With Snowflake, we’re now processing upward of one million batches of events every couple of minutes, and only paying for the processing power we’re using – saving a huge amount of money. Even more, I don’t have to be a database administrator, which is something I really like.”

Snowflake was founded to reinvent the data warehouse by a team of data experts from companies including Actian, Amazon, Cloudera, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Teradata, who hold more than 120 patents in databases and data processing. That team developed an all-new data warehouse, built from the ground up for the cloud. The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud—at a 90 percent lower cost than on-premises data warehouses.

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Resources

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Snowflake is hiring: https://www.snowflake.com/about/careers/

About KIXEYE

Founded in 2007, KIXEYE is a mobile and online gaming company that is redefining the intersection of fidelity and accessibility to create innovative experiences for competitive gamers. KIXEYE currently has over 300 employees based in its San Francisco headquarters, along with international offices in Brisbane, Australia, and Victoria, Canada, and is responsible for popular titles VEGA Conflict, Battle Pirates, War Commander, and Backyard Monsters.

About Snowflake

Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, has reinvented the data warehouse for the cloud and today’s data. The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is built from the cloud up with a patent-pending new architecture that delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud – at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. The company is backed by leading investors including Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Snowflake is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be found online at snowflake.net.

Media Contact
Danielle Salvato-Earl
Kulesa Faul for Snowflake Computing
(650) 922-7287

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