Indexima improves Snowflake user experience

Indexima, launched in 2016 to boost BI, joined The IT Press Tour this week that took place in Valletta, Malta. It was the right time to meet one of the founder, Nicolas Korchia, CEO, to learn more about the company and the product.

The idea came from a real performance problem discovered at Mappy, the french geo positioning service, around 2015. The realtime navigation implies some real latency each time a change is requested on the screen. And then the user experience became a nightmare. In 2017, the team raised €1.3M and the project took roots in Hadoop to address performance challenges. In 2020, more DBs have been added and a SaaS mode. It triggered some real adoption and in 2020 the company reached 15 customers. Then the Covid happened and hurt many companies of all flavors. This key moment served as a pivot time for Indexima and realized that the fast growing Snowflake cloud data warehouse represented the right environment to accelerate. During these years Hadoop has lost its footprint with many users adopting new solutions open source or commercial ones. This new wave was named Indexima 2.0, today for Snowflake and soon with Databricks.

The company has developed a real expertise on SQL queries optimization especially on complex ones wishing to solve this challenge to offer an easy user experience via simple interactive graphical dashboard or interfaces. The key idea in Indexima approach relies on the Pre Aggregation model with keys and aggregates.

In the past all data and Indexima were deployed on-premises and leverage some data copy with some risk of data divergence. With the v2, things are done in-place and for Snowflake it means within the CDW workplace so everything is available for all users. As soon as Indexima engine is deployed, it starts to collect SQL queries continuously, understand request model leveraging ML and AI and learn schema. Based on that it made its own optimization collecting information, creating special dynamic aggregation tables... and a 20s average delay is reduced to less than 1 second on the NYC citibike demo we saw.

The value is immediate as there is no need to develop anything just point to the new Indexima URL instead of the Snowflake one, cost is reduced as Snowflake instance can be smaller and performance is boosted with ratio such as 100:1.

The window of opportunity for Indexima appears to be significant with some real key paths to penetrate the market with data warehouse players and aggregations players. The team is looking for new partners to accelerate on this market aspect. The next effort will target Databricks so we anticipate some good days for the Indexima team.