Prequel
The Prequel team writes about engineering, product, and the data export industry.
- Posts
- 26 from 14 May 2022 to 29 Jan 2026
- Posting
- now and then (2 in the last year)
- Kind
- company blog
2026 1
2025 6
- Engineering Salesforce & Snowflake: B2B SaaS loves the Data Warehouse Oct 6, 2022 Conor McCarter Co-founder Last month, Salesforce announced a native integration with Snowflake. Why? And what does this mean for the rest of B2B SaaS?
- Product Building Data Products: The Three Questions You Should Ask When Spec’ing Out A Data Product Nov 30, 2022 Charles Chretien Co-founder The three questions you really should ask yourself before you start building a new data product.
- Engineering Database Drivers: Naughty or Nice? Dec 12, 2022 Charles Chretien Co-founder A list of the top driver bugs and misbehaviors we encountered this year.
- Engineering How to Share Data with Snowflake Data Sharing (with examples) Jan 31, 2023 Conor McCarter Co-founder A short guide to setting up Snowflake Data Sharing.
- Product Changelog 2/10/2023: Staging environments, multiple sources, & multiple products Feb 10, 2023 We're always adding new destinations, and this release includes a number of new object storage and database additions.
- Engineering SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ And Replaced It With A Postgres Queue Apr 11, 2023 Charles Chretien Co-founder Embracing our SQL Maxi nature: how we ripped out RabbitMQ from our infrastructure and replaced it with a Postgres queue.
2024 2
- Product Changelog 5/9/2023: Data import, webhooks, schema-tenanting May 9, 2023 Prequel now supports connecting to external (customer) data sources to import data — for many SaaS products, this is a critical capability.
- Engineering SQL Maxis: Constructing JSON objects in Athena using SQL May 17, 2023 Niger Little-Poole Engineering How we coerced Athena into constructing and exporting tables as rows of JSON objects
2023 13
- Product Changelog 8/28/2023: Role-based auth and new advanced features Aug 28, 2023 Conor McCarter Co-founder Prequel now supports role-based authentication (or "identity federation") for AWS or GCP destinations, including Redshift, Athena, S3, BigQuery, and Google Cloud Storage.
- Company Prequel raises $5.2M in Seed funding Sep 26, 2023 Charles Chretien Co-founder Announcing our Seed round.
- Engineering Building cross-cloud identity federation in Go for secure data sharing Nov 1, 2023 Niger Little-Poole Engineering How we built our improved cross-cloud data sharing authentication (with code examples).
- Product Major Feature Release: Schema Evolution Nov 15, 2023 Charles Chretien Co-founder How and why we built schema evolution into the Prequel platform
- Engineering How to build data export products using MongoDB Atlas May 30, 2024 Charles Chretien Co-founder In recent years, leading software companies have launched data sharing products that give customers direct access to the data they need.
- Engineering Go Generics: Writing an Immutable Slice in Go Dec 5, 2023 Wesley Herts Founding Engineer How to look out for “future you” when order matters.
- Engineering How fast is Iceberg on Snowflake? Oct 30, 2024 Conor McCarter Co-founder We tested the performance of Iceberg tables, external tables, and native tables on Snowflake.
- Engineering Expert Advice: Build or Buy for data export? Mar 18, 2025 Charles Chretien Co-founder We asked Kevin Suer, Director of Product at Zuora, what advice he would give to anyone evaluating whether to build or buy a data export solution.
- Product New: Share vector and geography data with your customers Feb 6, 2025 Charles Chretien Co-founder Any company that uses APIs or ETL tools to share vector or geographic data with customers can now use our Data Export Platform to drastically increase transfer throughput.
- Product New: Send customers Delta Lake formatted data Apr 22, 2025 Charles Chretien Co-founder Starting today, Prequel customers can export Delta Lake formatted data to their customers’ object storage containers, allowing them to query exported data much faster than before.
- Industry Everyone wants to be a Data Cloud Oct 7, 2025 Conor McCarter Co-founder The pace of “Data Cloud” launches is rising as emerging technologies both unlock new opportunities and threaten category leaders.
- Engineering Could Open Table Formats End the Reign of Snowflake and Databricks? Jun 25, 2025 Niger Little-Poole Engineering DuckLake asks a dangerous question: if your table catalog can just be a database, how much of Snowflake do you really need?
- Engineering SQL Maxis: How to get a character from a codepoint in Spark SQL Nov 4, 2025 Niger Little-Poole Engineering How we coerced Spark SQL into returning a proper character from a codepoint.
2022 4
- Industry Verticalization of the Data Warehouse Jan 29, 2026 Conor McCarter Co-founder Will Verticalization be a new growth experiment for the leading data warehouse platforms?
- Industry Some Questions Don't Fit in a Context Window Jun 10, 2026 Charles Chretien Co-founder Making your product useful to AI agents takes two data surfaces, not one. MCP handles point lookups and actions; data exports handle whole-table questions.
- Industry Agents Don't Read Dashboards Jul 16, 2026 Charles Chretien Co-founder Your customers' AI agents don't log into your product to do analysis. They query the data warehouse. What that means for the data features you ship.
- Engineering Building table-aware, partition-aware physical replication for Iceberg tables Aug 27, 2026 Conor McCarter Co-founder Using physical replication to improve cross-cloud Iceberg table replication throughput by over 9x.