For most investment firms, the answer is “not fast enough.” By the time a new vendor’s dataset is provisioned, tested, curated, and validated, the trial period is nearly over—and you’re left deciding whether to buy based on incomplete analysis.
Let’s look at why that happens and how My Data Outlet’s Snowflake Native App (MDO) completely changes the equation.
The Traditional Process: Manual, Costly, and Slow
Even once you’ve initiated a vendor relationship and secured access to a trial dataset, the technical hurdles begin immediately:
- Data Delivery Delays: With SQL Server or similar systems, it often takes a week or more for the vendor to build the extract and deliver the data.
- Storage Headaches: You’ll need a DBA to provision enough disk space—something that could take days if they’re backed up.
- Performance Optimization: Indexing needs to be built just to ensure your tests can run efficiently across 20–30 years of historical data.
- Heavy Lifting with SQL: The real effort comes in writing the SQL code to align the data to your firm’s standards. You’ll need to: 1) Normalize date formats 2) Understand and convert units (millions, billions, percentages) 3) Handle corporate actions and apply adjustment factors 4) Convert all values into a common currency
- Then comes tuning: Once the logic is written, you still need to optimize it for performance, so your queries return before your trial ends.
The end result? You’ve spent days, maybe weeks, just preparing the data, and you’re left making a purchasing decision on partial insights or scrambling to justify the expense.
What MDO Delivers Instead
With My Data Outlet’s Snowflake Native App, the trial evaluation process is radically accelerated:
Instant Data Access: As soon as a vendor enables Snowflake Data Sharing, you have real-time access to the dataset, no data copying or downloads required.
- Zero DBA Involvement: No concerns about disk space, server performance, or infrastructure setup.
- Prebuilt Workflows: MDO includes the most common workflows already aligned to your analytics needs, with all the required business logic: date alignment, unit normalization, corporate actions, and currency conversion, already built in.
- Backtest in Minutes: Run 20+ years of daily data across 20,000 securities in under 10 minutes.
- Decide Quickly and Confidently: You can evaluate how this data affects your models and make a well-informed purchasing decision, often within just a few days.
The Bottom Line
Data trials shouldn’t be a race against the clock. With MDO, what used to take weeks now takes minutes, empowering your team to explore, validate, and act faster than ever before.
