Welcome to today's day trading recap Friday April 16th. Let's go over these trades and then we'll come back and review the week Starting with today plus one thousand two twenty one fifty. So nice way to end the week Really nice day in the mighty 90s had four trades all four winners Boeing might Boeing plus one fifty nine Baidu plus two fifteen Twitter plus one sixty nine and then Roku My biggest position and biggest winner plus twelve thirty pairs trade a small loss one twenty four fifty in the Russell versus Nasdaq and Then on the runners beyond slapped me for nine eighty eight and use a scratch for minus fifteen and Peton nice winner for plus five seventy six So let's go over these trades and then we'll come back and recap the week starting with the mighty 90s Let's take a look at Boeing So Boeing had this nice flush in the morning coming into a key level nice nice pop and volume Caught this bounce here for a quick one fifty nine Baidu plus two fifteen So let's take a look at Baidu Baidu Baidu Baidu Start this out a little bit So Baidu had this push up broke through the highs of the day nice volume spike We got short right in this area here and caught this little down move there for a plus two fifteen Twitter plus one sixty nine Twitter had this nice flush down bouncing into yesterday's low We got long here on this volume spike and got a quick bounce in Twitter for plus one sixty nine And then my biggest winner Roku Was was this one here so it had this initial weakness it bounced up had this volume spike on that bounce We got short right here and just cut and I got in with some decent size there cut this nice flush That was about an eight minute trade for $1,230 so love those and Then on the runners beyond all right, so let's check out beyond beyond beyond slap me slap me good I was actually pretty small in here and I was using the seven day options On this one so it moved a little bit slower, but such a massive move Just got got slapped around a little bit So had this big volume spike is really pushing and I didn't know what was going on If there was news if they just struck a new deal with some retailer or you know what happened so Looked like a pretty prime Opportunity so when it started to pull back out long right here looking for a potential continuation higher But obviously that didn't happen this thing just kind of fell apart So I ended up just closing it out down here and just taking a loss M you was a scratch M you have shown some strong price action when it pulled back to this pivot here got long Push down below, but then pop right back up Got out a half for a nice profit And then it just kind of chop chop chopped around and when it started looking like it was breaking down I ended up closing out of my last piece and just scratching the trade So minus 15 on M you and then Pete's on a nice winner for five seventy six Peton was a Yeah, downside volume runner, so Peton was acting weak had had some big volume bars When it when we saw this one here, I was looking for an area to get short waited for it to bounce all the way up to Yesterday's low so got short right here really good entry and this thing just flushed down and just getting out of my trade right there So plus five seventy six so plus One thousand two twenty one fifty on the day Let me bring back the sheet and show you what we did for the week So on the week mighty nineties a little over twenty three hundred dollars on eleven trades nice win rate of over seventy two percent Pares trades. We only took three all three of which were small losers So we ended up taking a loss on our pairs trades of four eighty five seventy five and then the runners little under Fifty percent win rate on these this week and a small loss of minus five ninety two fifty So if we look at our summary a year to date I can see now in our mighty nineties We are up a little over five thousand year-to-date pairs trades almost seventeen hundred year-to-date runners Over eighteen thousand and total profit of over twenty five thousand on our day trades year-to-date Total summary going back to the end of August mighty nineties up over twelve thousand pairs trades Over twenty three hundred runners over forty six and we just cracked the sixty thousand dollar P&L mark Since we've been tracking these so pretty cool stuff Decent you know decent week just you know it's green plus twelve hundred nothing to Nothing to better than a sharp stick in the eye But the other thing I've done is I've gone back and started to update my P&L by day of week and so Looking to get a little bit of insight if there's certain days of the week that that I trade better than others Going into this and this is still a pretty small Small sample size. This is 15 weeks But starting to give us a little bit of insight before I even did this in my mind I thought okay I think Mondays and Fridays are going to be my worst trading days and sure enough all of all of them are green So that's good, but Monday has the lowest P&L overall so far and Friday is the second lowest so I was correct in those assumptions. I kind of thought you know Tuesday Wednesday Thursday would be the best Tuesday is actually not near as high as I thought but Wednesday and Thursday by far my best days of the week So I may start to you know depending on how the market is acting I may start to start to scale up my position size in those midweek days I started to a couple times in on Tuesday, and I then I had three losing Tuesdays in a row And so I kind of I kind of cut back a little bit, but You know, it really depends on the price action and how I feel that day, too So definitely midweek are kind of my three most profitable of the five days. So We'll be potentially scaling up some size I've only gone back to you the first of this year to collect to input this data It's kind of a tedious process. So I'll I'll eventually go back and do the rest But going forward these days of the week P&L will always be posted as well. And so we'll keep we'll continue to track that so Hope everybody had a good week of trading. We will be streaming in the live room every day next week So look forward to that having a lot of fun with you all so we'll see you there if you guys have any questions Let me know


And that's what we're doing with these with these coils because we have frequencies that can set that resonance automatically for somebody or for an environment. And I was just talking to one of my people on my leadership team. So she is a real estate agent and she's super skeptical right. So she said I don't know all this like abundant stuff and lux don't work but you know why it's free. I just downloaded and listened to this thing. So right. So she downloaded it, listened to it. Three hours later she got a call and said hey you know I want to list my house with you. And she said okay and that's that's great like who referred you to me. And she's like no one nobody referred me to you and they said okay well did you see me from my radio I mean from my tv show because she has a tv show and the guy the guy's like what tv show I didn't know you were a tv show and said well how did you find me. I said I didn't you know I just found you. And then you know if you've searched real estate there's like thousands of realtors that come out. Oh totally.


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Hey everybody, my name is Omer. And today I'm going to talk to you about our journey adding support for serverless apps in our debugger agent. But first, a little bit about me. I am a software engineer at Thrucout. I have a background in developing low-level applications in C on the Linux-enabled IoT environments. One day, I hope to stay to Southern French in Duolingo for a full month. But let's look at the head of ourselves. Let me start with the disclaimer first. This talk is going to be about the journey that we had as a company adding support for running in a serverless environment in our Node.js debugger. This is not, and I repeat, this is not a fully comprehensive guide or to-do list that will guide you through how to make the transition for application yourself. However, I do hope that understanding different pain points that we suffer from will help you to better identify and solve your pain points as well. So let's get to it. How do you do it? From the perspective of package, there is not a lot to be done. Your users just add you as dependency for your serverless handler and call you at the start of the endpoint. So let's look at a simple example. Let's say your package is called Logic. So previously, your users called Logic.start at the start of their main function. And to make the transition to a serverless app, all the only thing your clients had to do was call Logic.start at the start of their endpoint handler. Pretty simple, right? You also might want to consider publishing some helper functions to make the transition easier and make it easier to integrate your application in serverless environments. In our case, it was by publishing a helper function that wraps your endpoint and runs our debugger agent. After that, you can pretty much enjoy a new life by supporting serverless. And what went to our head at the time was easy peasy, lemon squeezy. But let's be realistic for a second here. It isn't going to be that simple, right? Otherwise, we won't be having this talk at all. So a few days later, we are getting a notice from a client. I can debug my application. For us, a debugger, this is really bad. It pretty much means we are not even fulfilling our most basic requirement. And that's not good. Our immediate reaction to that went something like this. So after our initial shock, we went on to investigate what was the problem. And it turned out that it takes about 20 seconds to start our agent. For most of our clients, that's fine. It usually happens only once at the first initialization of the app. When there is usually less traffic anyway, and it is not something that they would notice. However, for serverless apps, that same first initialization happens way more often. So let's go over the issues that users most commonly face with serverless apps. You've got cold starts. You've got a transition in your functions to be stateless. It's very easy to fall to vendor locking when first migrating. And you're also limited by the size of your package. So these are the big pain points for most application. We are not going to go over every single one of them on this talk, since we don't have the time for that. But we will talk about the major pain points that we faced when transitioning our debugger. It is also worth noticing that not all pain points are equal and some are less difficult than others and some harder. For example, if you decide to use a Docker image as your Lambda endpoint, you can increase the size of your app from 200 megabytes to 10 gigabytes simply by using Docker image instead. Our biggest challenge was the challenge of having big cold start times. To those of you not familiar with them, cold start. It is how long, how many time it takes to initialize a new serverless worker with your app until it is ready to handle an incoming request. That includes the time to set up the worker itself, set up your runtime, and also set up the different modules to compromise your application. And that is the thing that hurt us the most. So obviously, our first step is to understand what takes us so long to boot up. And we did it by benchmarking our application. Well, we found our first culprit and it was quite obvious for the debugger for Node.js. We take a lot of time parsing source maps. So before we begin our journey of trying to better improve our agent to support the serverless architecture, we need to note a few things. The main goal of this talk is mostly to guide the newer developers on how the different concepts and techniques programming use should be utilized to support the serverless architecture. If you're a more senior developer, you might find some concepts in this talk as obvious. But I hope you'll still learn something new. So before we actually begin our journey, let's briefly, very briefly, go over source maps themselves. What are they exactly? So in a nutshell, JavaScript world is a mess. You need to support many different runtime environments. You've got both Node.js and you've got browsers. And even when running on browsers, you need to support all different kinds of browsers where most of them are not compatible with each other. For example, if anyone here remembers indexplorer6, good old days. Also, some are very old and outdated like indexplorer6 and the question remains, how do you support all these environments? Well, that's why we have transpiders. The role of a transpiler is taking our source code which may or may not be written in JavaScript at all and converting it to JavaScript that is supported by almost all browsers and run environments. Let's look at a simple example. Let's say I have my source code written in TypeScript with type annotations and all the different aspects of TypeScript code. And I want to run it on a Node.js server. So Node.js knows how to run JavaScript code, vanilla JavaScript code. So the job that's transpiler is to take our source file and convert it to vanilla JavaScript code that is able to run on our server. It is worth noting that the final source code itself is usually a lot harder to understand as a human since a lot of different hacks are inserted to your code to make the support for different environments possible. So this raises a question. How do we actually debug our source code? Since we have actually two source files, the one we wrote and the one that is actually being run on the server. So how do you debug it? We know how our code looks but it isn't what has been finally run on the server. So the solution to our problem is source maps. They allow us to debug the source code on the server using the view we have of our source code that we wrote. It contains a mapping from every position in the final source code back to positions in our original source code. Let's take a look at a simple example. Over here, we can see an example source maps file. I am not going to go over each and every field here. Let's take a look at several of them. We've got a versions field which tells us which source maps version we are using. In this case, three. We've got the different sources that compromise the file. We've got the names of different elements but the most important one here is the mappings field.  The vanilla JavaScript code that was outputted by the transpiler and back to our original source code. In our example, it was our TypeScript code. When you actually pass this encoding, you can get the different line numbers and column numbers matching each position in the code. After all our talk about source maps, we've got enough background to actually tackle our problem. Let's get back to our original problem. We, as a debugger, must load your source maps in order to debug your application. The way that we do it is by parsing your source files. When you compile your code with source maps, it adds a comment containing a URL to the source map itself. We, the debugger, then read the source map and parse it, allowing you to debug. But when do we actually load the source maps? Well, the answer is quite simple and obvious. When a new source file is loaded, but that just leads to a different question. How do we know when a source file is loaded? And the answer, once again, is simple. V8 tells us. So what is V8 exactly? V8 is the engine that runs JavaScript code for Node.js. It is an event loop engine, and it is very fast and great. Our main communication with V8 is by subscribing to an event and passing a callback that will handle that event. For loaded scripts, we use the debugger.script.post event to get notified about loaded scripts. Pretty simple, right? When we first started out a couple years ago, when a script was loaded, we went over its source code, we looked for URLs that are pointed to related source maps. Then we loaded each source map URL and parsed it. That is a lot of work, both for loading the source file and for looking for the URLs of different source maps. Think how much I owe work we are doing here loading the source files only to look for the source map URLs. Source files can be huge, and we are spending a lot of time going over each line in them and looking for URLs. Short while later, we found out that one of the parameters to the callback of script parsed is actually source maps URL. That actually says us from loading the source file and looking for URLs of source maps. We saw massive, and I mean massive, performance improvements using this instead. And we learned a simple lesson here. Read the docs. When we initially wrote the code for that function, we tried running a POC and it didn't bother diving too deep into every bit of V8, which is a huge project with tons of documentation. But for us, reading the doc and diving deeper into our environment was an investment well spent that you should definitely make when you are trying to optimize your code. Let's continue with our search for the bugs. I get it lazy. Although we got a nice performance boost, it is still not enough. It is time to look at the next corporate. And it is every programmer's worst nightmare, working too hard. At first, when we only supported normal server apps, we loaded each script at the start of the program. And that means we also passed the source maps for each script at the start of the program. Think, for example, about the huge app with tons of different source files. That's a lot of source maps to pass. But that was a trade-off we did at the time between having one big spike of latency at the start of the app or having smaller, more spread-out latencies, but was that we couldn't be entirely predict? For example, how do you know exactly just from reading your source code? When will that file be loaded? It is a lot of mental overhead that you probably won't do. At a time, we thought it was better to have one big spike and having a much smoother running time for the rest of the app lifetime. However, when you're running a serverless app where it is entirely possible not all source files might not be needed at all for a request, the trade-off, it wasn't worth it for us. And so we decided to change how load scripts. Thinking back to our example, if our endpoint has different code paths, depending on the parameters of the request, what if one of the code paths only needs to load like five source files instead of like hundreds of them? We don't need to do that big amount of fork just for five files. Now we only do the necessary amount of fork and not more than that. This is yet another massive improvement to the loading time of the debugger. The lesson learned here is to identify and extract the pain points in the environment you are in. In the case of a normal app, we could compromise on startup times in exchange for lower latency later on. But that wasn't the case for us on serverless applications. There, we much better have smaller latencies that customers probably won't even notice but allow them to shrink their call start times by a whole lot. Well, we are at our final point now. So let's dive in. So we are seeing massive improvements in call start times, but we can push even further than that. We believe that send source maps parsing is our biggest time consumer. We're gonna still improve there. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. We are a debugger after all. Source map parsing is most of our job. In the end, the parsing part is done by an external dependency. And since most of our loading code was already optimized, we decided we need to take a dive deeper into the source maps parsing library as well. Initially, we thought about how we can optimize the original library we used. It was a different source maps library at that time. And if you can contribute to it, it would be awesome. I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain to you the importance of contributing to open source projects. But also after some investigations, we stumbled upon a different library called trace mapping. The library itself was written by Justin Ridgewell. Which I don't know if you guys know or not. Wrote another hugely famous JavaScript library and tool called Babel. And if you see right here, it even came with benchmarks. So let's take a look at the graph here. We can see a comparison between trace mapping, which is the library that Justin wrote, which does about 32 million ops per second versus the default source map parsing library at the time, which added best does 23 million operations per second. So as I'm sure you can see, we've got a big boost in performance just by switching. For us, it was an easy decision to make. We just need to put our code base to this new library. Thanks to that, we get even more performance improvements to our debugger and more importantly, even more performance improvements to our customers that load us at the start of their handler. But you probably already saw this coming. The main idea here is applicable not only to serverless apps. I'm going to look at something entirely different here to show you that it isn't something that is JavaScript specific or maybe serverless specific because I think this idea itself is very easy to implement in your code and might result in huge performance gains, mostly in your serverless apps, but sure in every other area that you might stumble upon. So let's dive into it, hash maps in Rust, something completely different. Let's take a look at the default hash map invitation. It is good for most of your use cases, but the developers over at the Rust Foundation team had a decision to make between denial of resistance to denial of service attacks and performance and they chose the resistance to denial of service attacks. It suits almost all of the different use cases. Mostly people can do without a little bit of performance in exchange for resistance to attacks and they are okay with that, but that doesn't mean you need to make that decision yourself. If you know you need speed, just change the defaults. It's okay. Let's look at this simple, very simple source code in Rust. So over on the first line, we can see how we can create a new hash map using the default hash show by calling hash map, column, column U. On the second and third line, we can see how to choose the hash shell that will be used for your hash map. Just as a side note, in this example we are using the different hash map as well in the second and third line, the default being random state, but you can hop on to crates.io and choose a different hash shell for your code as well. So over here we can see we called random state, column, column U, and then initialized our hash map with hash map, column, column, with hash shell, with our hash shell. So I think that the lesson learned here is to not be afraid to tweak the defaults to something that better suits your needs. At the time, the defaults was using the source map JS library, but we shouldn't be afraid to tweak it to use a different library that might not be the standard at the time, as a side note, it is now, but at the time it wasn't. And we should definitely use it instead. So let us conclude. We started with up to 20 seconds of call start times in edge cases. And we ended up with around 300 milliseconds. That's a huge boost for huge lambdas. As a side note, most lambda functions are small, so it takes way less. What did you learn in our journey? There is a lot more to consider when developing for service architecture versus a standard application. Let's look back at the previous slide. We went over our different pain points, call start times, package size limits, vendor locking, and all sorts of stuff like that. Also, call start can help a lot. And it is worth noting, you should always keep an eye out for optimization options. They are always out there, and sometimes they are hard to do, but sometimes they are just waiting for you to do them. And that's it for me. I hope you had a great time joining us on our journey and that you have learned some skills and ideas that you can utilize when doing the transition yourself.


Welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of Snowflake Summit 22 from Las Vegas, Seethra's Forum, Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We're going to unpack some really cool stuff next in the next 10 minutes with you. Karl Perry joins us, the director of product management at Snowflake. He's here to talk about Snowflake's new unistore workloads, how it's driving the next phase of innovation. Welcome to the program. Well, thank you so much for having me, this is awesome. There's a ton of momentum here. I saw the numbers from fiscal 23 Q1, product revenue, 394 million, 85% growth. A lot of customers here, the customer growth is incredible as well. Talk to us about unistore, what is it unpacked and how have the customers been influential in its development? Yeah, so unistore is a way for customers to take their transactional workloads for their enterprise applications and now have them run on or be built on top of Snowflake. And now you have your transactional data along with all of your historical data. So now you have a single unified platform for doing anything you need to do with your data, whether it's transactional single row lookups, we can do that, whether it's analytical data across, again, transactional and historical data in a single query that our customers are super excited about this. So what are hybrid tables? Is that just an extension of external tables? Yeah, that's a great question. So hybrid tables are a new table type that we've added to Snowflake and hybrid tables are really kind of just like another table with a couple of key differences. So number one is that hybrid tables provide fast, fine-grained read and write operations. So when you do something like a select star from customers where customer ID equals like A32, that's going to return extremely fast. But on top of that same data, your transactional data, you can actually perform amazing analytical queries that return extremely fast. And that's what hybrid tables at their core are. So what does this mean for, so you're bringing their world of transaction and analytics together. What does it mean for customers? Walk us through, Carl, an example. Yeah, so it's great. So Adobe is a customer that is looking at using and leveraging hybrid tables today and then more broadly Unistore. And frankly, Adobe has been an amazing customer since they started their journey. Just really quickly, they're in phase three. The first phase was customers had data in Snowflake that they wanted to take advantage of with the Adobe campaign platform. And so what they did is they built a connector, basically, into and being able to access customer data. And then they started to look at, well, this thing's working really well, let's try to leverage Snowflake for all our analytical needs. And so that was kind of phase two. And now phase three is like, look, let's go and reimagine what we can do with the Adobe campaign platform by having both the transactional and analytical data in the same platform so they can really enable their customers to do personalization, add campaign management, understanding the efficacy of those things at a scale that they haven't been able to do before. And prior to this capability, they would what, have to go outside of the Snowflake data cloud and then do something else and then come back in. Exactly, right? So they'd have a transactional system where all of the transactional state for what the customer was doing inside Adobe campaign, setting up all their campaigns and everything. And that would be stored inside a database, right? And then they would need to ensure that that data was moved over to Snowflake for further analytical purposes, right?  And with Unistore, we really believe that customers will be able to remove that complexity from their lives and have that single platform that really makes their lives easier. I mean, they'll still have a transactional system. Will they not? Or do you see a day where they sort of sunset that? I mean, there's a set of workloads that are not going to be the best choice today for Unistore and Hybrid Tables, right? And so we know that customers will continue to have their own transactional systems, right? And there's lots of transactions that customers rely and have entire applications and systems built around, right? Right now, with Hybrid Tables and Unistore, customers can take those enterprise applications, not consumer-facing applications, and move them over to leverage Snowflake, and then really think about reimagining how they can use their data that's both real-time transactional as well as all the historical data without the need to move things between systems or use a ton of different services. The Adobe example that you just gave seems like, I loved how you described the phases there and they're discovering, it's like peeling the onion and discovering more and more, but what it sounds like is that Snowflake has enabled Adobe to transform part of its business. How is Unistore positioned to be so transformational for your customers? Well, I mean, I think there's a couple of things. So one, they have this level of complexity today for a set of applications that they can completely stop worrying about, right? No need to maintain that separate transactional system for that, again, enterprise application. No need to maintain that ETL pipeline. That's kind of like one step. The next step is, I mean, all your data is in Snowflake, so you can start leveraging that data for insight and action immediately. There's no delay in being able to take advantage of that data, right? And then number three, which I think is the most compelling part is because it's part of Snowflake, you get in the benefit of Snowflake's entire ecosystem, whether it's first-party capabilities like easy to manage and enforce really powerful governance and security policies, right? Being able to take data from the marketplace and actually join it with my real-time transactional data. This is game-changing, and then, most importantly, is the third-party ecosystem of partners who are building all these incredible solutions on top of Snowflake. I can't even begin to manage what they're gonna do with hybrid tables in Unistore. So, Carl, I have to ask you, so I talked to a lot of customers and I talked to a lot of technology companies. Explain, so Snowflake obviously was the first to separate compute from storage and the cloud database, and then tons of investment came into that space. They kind of follow you on. So that's cool, you reached escape velocity, awesome. But a lot of the companies that I talked to were saying, we're converging transaction and analytics. I think Gartner calls it HTAP or something. They came up with a name. Explain the difference between what you're doing and what everybody else is doing and what customer benefits you're delivering. Yeah, so I mean, I think that's a really great question. To use the term that you use HTAP, right? It's an industry-understood term. Really, when people think about HTAP, what that is about is taking your transactional data that you have and enabling you to do fast analytical capabilities on that. That's great, but there are a couple of problems that historical HTAP solutions have suffered from. So number one, that acceleration, that columnar format of data is all in memory. So you're bound by the total amount of memory that you can use to accelerate the queries that you want to. So that's kind of problem one. This is not the approach that Snowflake is taking. Most importantly, it's not just about accelerating queries on transactional data, whether it's a single-row lookup or a complex aggregate. It's about being able to leverage that data within the data cloud, right? I don't want to have a separate data set on a transactional system or an HTAP system that can give me great analytics on transactional data, and then I can't use it with all the other data that I have. It's truly about enabling the transformation with the data cloud and completely taking away silos so that your data, whether it's real-time, whether it's historical, can be treated as a single data set. This is the key thing that is different about Unistore. You can take the power of the data cloud, all of it, all the partners, all the solutions, and all the capabilities we continue to add, and leverage your data in ways that nobody's thought of possible before. Governance is a huge component of that, right? So in the press release, you have this statement. As part of Unistore, Snowflake is introducing hybrid tables. You explained that, which offer fast, single-row operations and allow customers to build transactional business applications directly on Snowflake. That's a little interesting tidbit. So you expect customers are going to build transactional applications inside the data cloud and somewhat minimize the work that is going to be required by their existing transactional databases, correct? Exactly, and I think, so let me say a couple things on this, right? So first of all, there's a class of applications that we'll be able to just build on top of hybrid tables and run on Snowflake directly for their transactional needs. I think what's super interesting here though is when you, again, start to talk about all your data. One example that we're going to walk through tomorrow on our talk is being able to do a transaction that updates data in a hybrid table and then updates data in a standard Snowflake table and then either being able to atomically commit or roll back that transaction. This is a transaction that's spanning multiple different table types inside Snowflake and you'll have consistency of either the rollback or the commit. This type of functionality doesn't exist elsewhere and being able to take and build transactional applications with these capabilities we think is transformative. And that's all going to happen inside the Snowflake data cloud with all the capabilities. And it's not like what you're doing with Dell and Pure. It's nice, but it's read only. You can't add and delete and do all this stuff. This is native, first class citizen inside the data cloud. Just like other table types, you'll be able to take on and leverage the power of the data cloud as a normal table that you'd be able to use elsewhere. Got to ask you, your energy and the way that you're talking about this is fantastic, the transformation that it's going to be, how central it is to the product innovation since Snowflake is coming out with. What's been the feedback from customers as there's so many thousands of folks here today? Keynote was standing in your room only. There was an overflow. What are you carrying on the floor here? Well, I mean, I think it was funny in the talk when I announced that primary keys are going to be required and enforced and we got a standing ovation. I was like, wow, I didn't expect people to be so excited about primary key enforcement. I mean, what's been amazing, both about the private preview and the feedback we're getting there and then some of the early feedback we're getting from customers is that they want to understand and really think about like, wait, I can use Snowflake for all of this now? And honestly, I think that people are kind of like, but wait, what would I do if I could have those applications running on Snowflake and not have to worry about multiple systems? Wait, I can combine it with all my historical data and anything that's in the data cloud, like what can I do is the question they're asking? And I think that this is the most fascinating thing. Customers are going to build things they haven't been able to build before and I'm super excited to see what they do. More specifically, my takeaway is that customers, actually application builders are going to be able to build applications that have data inherent to those apps. I mean, John Furrier years ago said, data is the new development kit. And it never happened, the data stack, if you will, separate from the application development stack, you're bringing those two worlds together. So what do you think the implications are of that? Well, I mean, I think that we're going to dramatically simplify our customers' lives, right? A thing that we focus on at Snowflake is relentless customer innovation so we can make their lives better. So, I mean, frankly, we talk to customers like, wait, I can do all this? Wait, are you sure that I'll be able to do this? And we walk through what we can do and what we can't do. And they really are like, wow, this could just dramatically simplify our lives and wait, what could we do with our data here? And so, I think with the announcement of Unistore and also all the native app stuff that we're announcing today, I think we're really trying to enable customers and app developers there to think about and being able to leverage Snowflake as their transactionalism, the system of source. So, I mean, I'm super excited about this. I came to Snowflake to work on this and I'm like, can't believe we get to talk about it. How does this work? What's the secret sauce behind it? Is it architecture or is it? Yeah, so I mean, I think a big part of it is the architecture that we chose. So, number one, a key product philosophy that we have with Snowflake is we have one product. We don't have many. We don't put the onus of complexity onto our customers. And so, building that into Snowflake is actually really hard. So, underlying hybrid tables, which is the feature that powers Unistore, is a row base storage engine, right? And then data is asynchronously copied over into a columnar format. And what this provides, because it's just another table that's deeply integrated with Snowflake, is the compiler's completely aware of this. So, you can write a query that spans multiple tables and take advantage of it and we'll take all the complexity. Whether it needs to be a fast response to a single row lookup, or it needs to aggregate and scan a ton of data, we'll make sure that we choose the right thing and provide you with the best performance that we can offer. We built that intelligence inside of that. Completely built in and amazing, but provided in a very simple fashion. You said you came to Snowflake to do this? Yes, yes. How long ago was that? I came here a little over a year and a half. Okay. And they started working on this obviously beforehand, just envisioning it. Yep, right? Yeah. I mean, this is absolutely incredible. I have been working on this now for a year and a half. Some of the team members have been working on it for more. And it's incredible to finally be able to talk to customers and everybody about it, and for them to tell us what they're trying to do.  What about this scenario? And it's awesome to hear their requirements, right? The thing that's been most amazing, and you'll hear it in the talk tomorrow with Adobe, who's been a great customer, is like, customers give us insanely hard requirements. And what I love about this company is not, well, you know, it's easier to do it this way. It's like, no, how can we actually make their life easier? And so we really focus on doing that with Snowflake. And that's one of the things Frank talked about this morning with that mission alignment being critical there. So it's in private preview now. When can folks expect to get their hands on it? Well, we don't have a date right now we're talking about, but you can go sign up to be notified of the public preview when we get there. I think it's like snowflake.com slash tri dash Unistore, but we'll publish that later. And if you're interested in the private preview, talk to your account team and we'll see if you can get in. Carl, thank you so much for joining Dave and me in an action-packed 15 minutes talking about the power of Unistore, what it's going to enable organizations to do. And it sounds like there's your top on the surface. There's so much more innovation that's to come.  Yes, that sounds awesome. Thank you so much. Our pleasure. Per Carl and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Snowflake Summit 22 from the show floor in Las Vegas. We're going to be right back with our next guest.


It says one of the keys on my keyboard doesn't work in lower case in Microsoft Word. Upper case works fine. WTF. Yes, truly. Other programs, it works fine also. No one seems to have heard of this problem. Any thoughts? Yes, I do. I've had very similar. If it's only in Word effectively and it's nowhere else, the one thing I would say one, have you tried other words where that particular, whatever the letter is that keeps changing? What's the word that it's actually changing in? Is it like capital I? Every time you type, I am kind of thing. Capital I reduces to a lower case I or upper case I, for example. But it's fine if it's inside a word. If it's something that seems to be somewhat unique as it's a character, more often than not, what I've actually seen is if you go into your spell, your spelling, often an auto correct. Yeah, it's a spell check auto correct. So if you go to file options and in file options, you've then got your proofing. Underneath your proofing, if you go in there and have a look at your auto correct options, you might actually find in the auto correct list. So if you work your way down the list, there's usually a really long list of different things. It's really handy to actually have because you can actually, for example, inside a business, you could be literally going WTF and have it spell it out in full. Hopefully we're not swearing, but you know what I mean. You can, every time you do a spelling mistake, you can then auto correct for you. I do it all the time, especially on my phone. I always go TBE, no, it's just the B and it's just all too close together. So I fixed it so it auto corrects and fixes it and puts it correct for me. So usually that's where I see it often happens. It's been the auto correct. Have a look through there and see if that will actually fix it. That's kind of the one solve. Cause if it's only happening there and it's only happening on sort of that, then I would say it's auto correct. You know, I think you've discounted one other possibility here is that you have nanobot infected jam that you have spilled on your keyboard and it is intelligently selecting and stymying your effort to do that one letter on your keyboard. That could happen, it could be possible. You don't know, we don't know. Oh, like me, I accidentally chose the wrong keyboard, you know, on set up. So now every time I try and do an at signal, it's, you know, I've got to swap it over and I have to fix that, you know, but. I don't know. No. It's nano jelly. I think it's nano jam. No, no, no, no, no. Oh yeah. My, yeah, again, good luck with the nano jam problem. Good luck.  That's all I'm saying. And keep kids wide.


After Ukraine, Putin will clean up Armenia. If Ukraine loses, then America's enemies will determine the world order. Former NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson said this. If the Ukrainians lose, if Putin wins, we all lose. After the victory over Ukraine, Putin will clear Moldova, Armenia and Kazakhstan and create a buffer zone there. Lord Robertson of Port Ellen has seen his fair share of international crisis according to the telegraph. It is noted that as Tony Blair's Secretary of State for Defense and later the Secretary-General of NATO between 1999 and 2003, he presided over NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the alliance's enlargement to include former Warsaw Pact members in Eastern Europe and its only ever invocation of Article 5, the North Atlantic Treaty's Self-Defense Clause, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Unlike many retired politicians and generals, he is still viewed by serving defense officials and thinkers as a credible elder, statesman. Now, he has a warning. We are living through a period of global volatility, unlike anything in history, and we are not rising to the occasion. I think the next stage for Putin, if he succeeds here, is that you build up another buffer. He will mop up Moldova, Armenia, Kazakhstan, building that buffer in there. There is a timidity both in the White House and in Downing Street and in other capitals in Europe that they don't want to escalate. You can't give them long-range weapons because they might use them into territorial Russia, then we will have World War III. So that fear of escalation is reducing that objective that Ukraine has got to win. Lord Robertson explains.


Age for education, and lifelong learning. As I've run out of time to get the people in as possible, I'd be grateful for short and succinct questions and answers to match. Question 1, Graham Pearson. To ask the Scottish Government how many vacant beds there are in secure units for locked up—looked after children. Minister Fiona McLeod. Salutad ni unig iawn. PaTF我覺得 that there are ninety secure beds in Scotland, capacity is monitored daily and information is available on the SECURE accommodation Network Scotland website. Some concerns have been raised recently about the capacity within the 17. South of the butiol i gannig o cael gweithio cyfgla kuwydau gyda'r cynnwys yng ngydag ddatblygu. Rydyn ni wedi bod yn ei gydag i desgau cyfglau'r bod yn ei gyrfa i gael ar hyn. Felly, dweud y ffawr i ddannu'r casgliad hwn oes wedi cyfawr, ac yn ei ddynnu'r casgliad. Mae'r prifysgol holl yn gweithio i ddangos eu gwiaith bryd wneudio, os y ddangos cyfwydd, fi'n gwy laughio ffawr i dd requithu o'r bwysigau. diwethaf a'r gŷnodd ar gweithio i ddweud hynny, ym 7-8 oes bydwyd yw 9% gyda'r 2011-12, a'r 13% i ddydig i'w Llywodraeth 90 o'r glimbarth. Dwi'n gweithio i ddysgu i gyfianiadau ac i ddysgu i ddodwyrhau Llywodraeth Creifwyr i gydig ym 13%. Isi'r cyfeirwyr iddo i ddysgu i ddysgu i gyfianwyr gyllidau ym 60, cucumbers, I assure Mr Pearson that when I asked last week there were no children known to be accommodated outside of Scotland. To ask the Scottish Government how it supports college students to complete their studies. On top of the record, the record is £104 million for student support this year. We have been working gyda College Scotland a the Scottish Funding Council to understand the scale of any shortfall in 1415. College's have now said that they need £7 million down from their earlier estimate of £11 million, and I'm very pleased to say that we will bridge that gap. In addition, since 2006, seven successful completion rates for full-time FE students has increased by 10 percentage points and for those from the most deprived backgrounds by 13 percentage points. I am pleased to hear that the Scottish Government is taking seriously the problems facing college students at this time, particularly given that our FE colleges have an excellent reputation of addressing inequalities and giving opportunities to students of all ages and backgrounds. Although the bursary awards have increased by 18 per cent, funding only increased by three, childcare awards increased by 22, but the budget only went up by six. I appreciate what the cabinet secretary is doing. Will she also have a look at the NUS findings that illustrate those figures? I appreciate the question from Mrs Scanlon. She will, of course, appreciate that our record and student support for further education college students is very good, and the budget before this Government took office was £67 million, and it now sits at £104 million. As I said in my original answer, we have worked very hard as we do every year to fill the gap every year. There are, of course, planned improvements for 15-16 with inflationary increases in bursary scales and childcare. I am due to speak with NUS this afternoon and to have a further meeting with them in due course about a whole range of student support matters. It is extremely welcome to hear that the gap in bursary funding is to be bridged again this year. That is welcome, but the reality is that not knowing until now that that money is going to be available has a real impact. Students are left waiting many months not knowing if they will get bursaries. Colleges have to spend or overspend their budgets. We did not be better, instead of doing this every year if the Scottish Government has budgeted enough money for supporting students in the first place. I am glad that Mr Gray welcomes the information that I gave earlier that we are indeed meeting our obligations to students, as we always do. As he will be aware, there are difficulties in predicting the levels of student support required because it varies on the personal circumstances of students, whether they have children or whether they do not have children and, indeed, on the age of the student. Nonetheless, we will continue to work very hard with our partners and with NUS Scotland to resolve outstanding issues. The Scottish Government's budget for college funding compares to that in England. The Scottish Government has managed to stabilise college funding. Members will be aware that we have created a funding floor of £522 million, and in the draft budget published that will go up to £526 million for the forthcoming financial year. In contrast, BIS plans to cut its adult skills budget by £466 million, which is a decrease of over 17 per cent. Given that we seem to be able to predict the numbers in the budget for higher education, but somehow we cannot predict it in further education, does the cabinet secretary believe that Scottish further education students are treated like second-class citizens compared to others in higher education? No, I certainly do not, Mr Finlay, and I am sure that that is no surprise to you. There is a very genuine debate about the benefits of discretionary funding versus entitlement funding for HE students. Of course, there are many higher education students in the college sector. They have entitlements to bursaries and loans. Of course, they have to pay loans back, whereas for further education students, who could be entitled to up to £93 a week discretionary funding but, of course, they do not have to pay that back. However, those are all issues that we have to explore in the round. To ask the Scottish Government what work it is carrying out to streamline the process for the registration of new teachers. The registration of teachers is a matter for the General Teaching Council for Scotland. Would the minister agree that we need to attract teachers from the EU and across the world and that this is ended by the failed immigration policies coming out of Westminster? I very much agree that, to the right regulatory controls that are being applied by the General Teaching Council for Scotland, Scotland can and does benefit from a diverse teacher workforce from countries outside Scotland. It is vital that the UK's immigration policy, as the member alludes to, takes cognisance of that need and that its rhetoric is suitable on the subject, too. Liam McArthur There is considerable movement between teachers north and south of the border. Does he believe that there is work to be done by GTCS in terms of smoothing the process so that vacancies can be filled in teaching posts across Scotland, as well? The typical period for registration for teachers within Scotland is around three to four weeks. For teachers who are coming from outside Scotland, it is typically around 10 weeks. However, I understand that the point that the member makes, and there have been considerable efforts made in particular areas where there has been a specific need urgently for teachers to fast-track that process. For instance, there were successful efforts to fast-track the progress for registration for a number of teachers from Ireland who are applying for jobs in the north-east of Scotland recently. To ask the Scottish Government what discussions it has had with Dumfries and Galloway Council regarding its plans for Dumfries Learning Town. We have been working in partnership with Dumfries and Galloway Council through the preparation of the Dumfries Learning Town initiative, and we will continue to engage with the local authority to help to realise that vision. In addition, the Government is providing substantial investment of around £14 million through the Schools for the Future programme to replace Max Welton High School and its associated community facilities, and St Joseph's College, both of which form part of the Dumfries Learning Town initiative. For his reply, the minister will be aware that the Dumfries Learning Town involves a new model of 13 to 3 to 18 education that is delivered on a whole town basis, and that involves the creation of a learning hub in north-west Dumfries, bringing together early-years vocational education and adult education. Does the minister agree that the approach is consistent with the recommendations of the wood report, and will the Scottish Government therefore support the creation of the learning hub? As has already been mentioned, there has been a degree of engagement along tradition and almost engagement between the Government and Dumfries and Galloway Council over the subject, and no shortage of investment in schools in the area. The Government does support the aspiration of a learning hub for Dumfries, but it is no secret that the Government has taken a different view from the council when it moved away from its initial proposals, which would have seen the hub centred on the Crichton campus. Question 5 has not been lodged, and an explanation has been provided. Question 6, Annabelle Goldie. To ask the Scottish Government whether it anticipates a university student population contracting or expanding over the next five years. The Scottish Government does not anticipate a significant contraction or expansion over the next five years. The number of first-degree entrants who live in Scotland and, broadly, the measure of the number of school leavers going to universities up 7 per cent under this Government to 33,500. The minister will be aware of the recent Scottish Funding Council announcement regarding indicative funding decisions for 2015-16, and she will also be aware that there are continuing challenges in widening access to university, an area in which none of us wants to see any contraction at all. Research confirms a funding package for Scotland's poorest students to be the most regressive in the United Kingdom because of significant cuts to bursaries. How does the Scottish Government think that switching students from bursaries to loans so that they have more debt can possibly improve access to university for our poorest students? Of course, I'm rather stunned that Miss Goldie has tripped up to this chamber to ask me about student debt when, in Scotland, on average, students have debt of around £7,500 in comparison to the £20,000 on average that students in England graduate with. I think that the Scottish Government has a record that compares well with her Government south of the border. Of course, we very much believe that education should be based on the ability to learn and not the ability to pay. We will stick firmly to our position of no tuition fees. The balance between supporting tuition fees and the balance between bursary and loans is something that we have discussed with NUS Scotland. It was at the request of NUS Scotland that we do what we can to ensure that we get more money into the pockets of students and, in terms of our minimum income guarantee for the students from the poorest household, depending on whether they can be in a student's living at home or in a student's living away, that support package is either the best or the second best in the UK. I heard what the cabinet secretary has just said to Miss Goldie in response to the question about students from more disadvantaged backgrounds. Could the cabinet secretary expand on her answer and perhaps give other examples of what the Scottish Government is doing to ensure that students from disadvantaged backgrounds in Scotland get the opportunity to take part in university education? The programme for government very clearly set out the creation of a widening access commission. The commission will advise on how the number of students entering university from the more disadvantaged areas or backgrounds can be increased. Of course, the proportion of 18-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university under this Government is improved from the previous Government. However, we will not detract from the fact that much more needs to be done. For example, that is why there is £2 million of funding in 2015-16 for local widening and access initiatives through the Scottish Funding Council. The funding for the impact for access fund has been doubled. The cabinet secretary has, her Government, reduced the size of bursaries available to students and lowered the income threshold above which bursaries are replaced by loans. How can she possibly come to this chamber and pretend that that is helping students from low-income families? Of course, Mr Gray, but Mr Gray fails to recognise that, in terms of where we are now, we very much did that in a collaborative approach with NUS Scotland. On the points that he raised about thresholds and income thresholds, that is a very important issue. If you compare what happens in Scotland compared to south of the border, the threshold incomes in Scotland are lower, but so are the interest repayment rates. As Mr Swinney said last week in the budget debate, that is something that we can look at whether we change the threshold rates. The threshold rates are due to be uplifted, but there are some aspects of that that require treasury consent. To ask the Scottish Government what progress it has made on agreeing educational outcomes with COSLA as part of the local government settlement. Discussions on the matters between the Scottish Government, COSLA and partners, including the teacher unions, is on-going. I wonder whether the minister could advise us, however she seeks to present that the Government has abandoned the pledges on teacher numbers and class sizes. Let me say as succinctly and as clearly as I possibly can that this Government has not and will not abandon teachers and does not abandon our commitment to maintaining teacher numbers. That is a very important matter. That is a very important matter, one that we take with great seriousness and that we are discussing with our partners in local government. While teacher numbers have been stabilised since 2011, the recent census in December shows a small change, a small reduction in the number of teachers, but any change in the wrong direction is a concern to this Government. We are firmly of the view that the number of high-quality teachers is imperative to the life chances and the education of our children. Can the cabinet secretary confirm that all parties are represented in these talks with COSLA and that those involved should be consistent in what they say both during those negotiations and out with them? It is an important principle in any negotiation of any sort that parties have to maintain a consistent position both within and out with the negotiations. The talks that we are involved in as a Government involve all our key partners, including COSLA, teacher unions, parental organisations and other bodies such as Education Scotland, ADIS, Directors of Education Scotland and chief executives of the Scottish local government. To ask the Scottish Government what support it is providing to colleges in West Scotland to improve the fabric of their buildings. The Scottish Government is committed to supporting all colleges, including those in the west Scotland region, to invest in the restates. The current financial year, we have provided £26.6 million of capital funding to the Scottish Funding Council to support infrastructure investment across the sector. The disbursement of the funding to individual colleges is of course a matter for the Scottish Funding Council. I thank the cabinet secretary for that reply. In the past, I have called for a feasibility history to undertake to see if an alternative location in Inverclyde could be sought for the campus there. I believe that the Scottish Funding Council has had discussions with West College Scotland regarding options for its community campus. I would be grateful to know whether the Scottish Government will consider any proposals from West College Scotland regarding the fabric of its building in the next spending review period. The Scottish Funding Council has indeed been in discussion with West College Scotland and has recently provided £70,000 to help it to develop a business case outlining options for the green at campus. That is of course a matter for the Scottish Funding Council, but the Scottish Funding Council is currently developing a 10-year strategy that is aimed at determining priority investment opportunities across both the college and university states. That strategy will form the basis of discussion with the Scottish Government around capital funding at the time of the 2016 spending review. I understand that the Scottish Funding Council has agreed to include proposals from West College Scotland in that strategy. To ask the Scottish Government how many college students are achieving qualifications that are recognised and valued by employers. I am pleased to say that 73,704 college students on full-time and substantive part-time courses successfully obtained recognised qualifications in 2013-14, an increase of almost 15 per cent compared with 2006-07. That is strong evidence that our vision of a college sector focused on skills to help people to get jobs is beginning to pay off. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. Does the cabinet secretary agree with me that this shows that focusing the college sector on skills for working economic growth is starting to pay dividends? I think that there is a very strong body of evidence that students and employers are beginning to reap the rewards of college reform, as well as the figures already mentioned, and the latest statistics from the Scottish Funding Council show that the average hours of learning, for example, per student, is up by 59 per cent since 2006-07, and that we also have record rates of successful completion and, crucially, 17 per cent more full-time students between the ages of 16 to 24 than we had in 2006-07. I think that great credit is due to college leaders who have clearly seized the opportunities that are presented by reform and are definitely delivering better outcomes for young people. To ask the Scottish Government what support it provides to local authorities for fostering programmes. Local authorities are responsible for the provision of foster care in their areas supported through the block grant. The Scottish Government has provided over a million pounds between 2007-14 to the fostering network to support local authorities and the wider sector to recruit, retain and develop foster carers. The Scottish Government produced the first national guidance to help local authorities to commission foster care more effectively and in line with the needs of each child. We are looking at ways in which we can provide more direct support to local authorities in strategic commissioning and how to optimise recruitment. The Scottish Government's response to the foster care review that was published in 2014 agreed to take forward recommendations that will support local authorities in improving the way that fostering services are run and to expand the skills of foster carers. I thank the minister for that answer. The minister will be aware, however, that it was recently reported that Fife had the largest waiting list of children waiting to be put into foster homes with 27 children in residential units over Christmas. The next largest waiting list was 17 in Falkirk. What steps can be taken to reduce what has been described as an urgent need for foster carers in Fife? Fife is, with all other local authorities, responsible for their own recruitment, as their best place to know what their local needs are. The Scottish Government is supporting a number of local authorities through our realigning children's services programme to map longer-term demand levels for services, including foster care. That will aid local authorities in recruiting the right number of foster carers when and where they are needed. In 2013, the Scottish Government ran a fostering recruitment and retention seminar in Glasgow to support local authorities and independent fostering agencies to share successful experiences and good practice. That resulted in a recruitment and retention forum being established. The member may wish to know that the fostering networks' estimated shortage figures for foster carers in Scotland have been halved in the last four years. To ask the Scottish Government how it is supporting colleges and other adult learner providers to improve adult literacy and numeracy and what progress has been made in tackling poor basic skills in adults. Collegies are now funding on the basis of meeting the needs of learners in the regions, including programmes that are focused on literacy and numeracy for adult learners. Collegies continue to play a key role in providing education to adult learners, with 27 per cent of all college sector learning hours in 2013-14 being delivered to students aged 25 or over. We are committed to improving adult literacy and numeracy levels across the whole of Scotland, as outlined in the literacy action plan. The standing literacy commission will produce a final report on the progress of the plan in the spring. Progress in tackling basic skill levels has been improving. The latest available figures show a small reduction in the proportion of adults aged 16 to 64 with low or no qualifications from 13 per cent in 2012 to 12.6 per cent in 2013. I thank the cabinet secretary for her response. However, figures from the Scottish funding council show that, since 2011, college budgets in Scotland have been cut in real terms by £61 million. There are now over 32,000 fewer adult learners in college than there were when this Government was elected in 2011. Would the cabinet secretary agree with me that, given the extent to which college budgets and places in Scotland have been cut, this Government is not given the adult learners the support that they need to improve their basic skills, something that is essential for them to get jobs and to escape the cycle of deprivation and poverty that so many find themselves in? I do very much regret that Mr Rowley, along with some of his other colleagues, has a misplaced faith in headcount, when the reality is that we know that the most meaningful measurement of college activity is full-time equivalent. I remind him that this Government's manifesto commitment is to maintain full-time equivalent. In fact, we have exceeded that. The move to full-time courses does benefit young people, but it also benefits older learners. As I said in my answer, 27 per cent of all college sector learning hours are delivered to people that are over 25. In terms of the budget, Mr Rowley will be well aware that this Government, like our partners, is living with Westminster austerity. Our discretionary budget has been reduced by 10 per cent. Nonetheless, there is a funding floor of £522 million, increasing to £526 million, certainly more in cash terms than the £510 million under the previous Labour Liberal Executive. I know that Mr Rowley cares deeply about adult literacy in human aid, because I know his background in community education. I also know that Fife Council has a very good record in this area. It is not unreasonable for colleges to align their provision with their local government partners, either. To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to monitor the pay of university principles. The Scottish Government has made it clear in the past that some increases in the remuneration of principles have been unacceptable. Although a number of universities have exercised restraint in setting senior pay in the latest rounds, our view certainly remains and persists. Senior pay packages should be in step with the salary terms and conditions that are offered to other university staff. Institutions must ensure the high standards of transparency in setting pay awards. I thank the cabinet secretary very much for that reply. Does the cabinet secretary share my concerns over the transparency of university bodies such as the remuneration committee? It is now an impossible to find out who are on them when they met or indeed what was said. According to Glasgow Caledonia, the remuneration committee last met in 2012, which is at least better than Glasgow University's information. Will you meet me to discuss those concerns? Yes, I am happy to meet Ms White to discuss her concerns. Bearing in mind in particular, the constituency that she represents, Glasgow Kelvin, where it includes a university in a large part of the academic community, will indeed be constituents of Ms White. It is important that, with anybody who is in receipt of large amounts of public funding, there is transparency at all levels, including remuneration committees. To ask the Scottish Government what educational principles will underpin the Higher Education Governance Bill. The Scottish Government is investing over £1 billion this year and next in higher education institutions. In return, we expect institutions to embrace good governance based on open, accountable and democratic principles. Improved governance will help to create better learning environments where staff and students have more say in how their institutions operate. Our consultation on the Higher Education Governance Bill ends this month, and the views of all stakeholders will of course be considered. The cabinet secretary will be aware of the many concerns being expressed at the potential loss of traditions and autonomy that have underpinned Scotland's ancient universities. What added value will the proposed changes to their governance bring to universities such as Aberdeen, which have been rated as world leaders in the recent research excellence framework assessment of the impact of the research outputs on society, business and culture? Does she agree that, far from strengthening the sector's effectiveness, the proposals for university governance could actually compromise the performance of Scotland's universities? As I said to Ms Millan and Mansour, we will, of course, look at all the responses to her consultation in very great detail. It is part of a programme of government that we will indeed have a higher education governance bill. We, of course, recognise that universities are, indeed, autonomous, but they are also in receipt of large sums of public money. Part of the bill is about having a definition and a safeguard of academic freedom, but it is important to recognise that issues of transparency and good governance do, for example, lead to a more productive engaged workforce, which will certainly improve the learning outcomes for students. To ask the Scottish Government how many people as an Aberdeen are being provided with free school meals following its recently introduced policy. While that information is not held centrally, we collect data on the uptake of free school meals annually through the healthy living survey, which was carried out in February and published in June, and we expect the policy to benefit 135,000 children across Scotland. I thank the minister for his answer. Aberdeen City Council has recently changed menus in some schools. Parents have not been fully informed about that and have often been withdrawing children, particularly those with specific dietary requirements or additional needs, from meals. Could the minister tell me what, if any guidance is in place to ensure that there is consultation and communication about menu changes, so that all those who are entitled can get their free school meal? There certainly is guidance in some areas. Our guidance, better eating, better learning, makes clear that the involvement of parents and families in supporting activity around food and health is essential. In preparing to deliver the free school meals policy for primary 1 to 3, local authorities must consider the implications for the school meals service, for arrangements, including any opportunity that that might afford to make further improvements. It should also be said that the nutritional requirements for food and drink in schools are in place, and better eating and better learning is clear that all schools should have a documented process in place for dealing with special dietary requirements. 15. Richard Baker Thank you. To ask the Scottish Government how it is engaging with schools to encourage people to consider careers in the oil and gas industry. The Government recognises the importance of the oil and gas sector and indeed the whole energy sector in Scotland for the current and future job opportunities of young people. Learning and skills development, which supports pathways into the energy sector, is embedded within curriculum for excellence and features a number of national qualifications. Education Scotland, Energy Skills Scotland and Skills Development Scotland are working in partnership to ensure a co-ordinated approach to raising awareness of energy sector careers with our schools. That includes career events for young people at school, involving industry and colleges. We will continue those efforts as we take forward our plans for developing Scotland's young workforce. Richard Baker Does the minister agree that, despite the recent contraction in the oil and gas sector, it is important to emphasise to pupils that there are still great opportunities in the industry? Will he welcome the work of Northfield Academy in Aberdeen in working with oil and gas businesses to enable pupils to attain the skills for a career in the industry and what support will ministers provide schools, particularly in the north-east, to take forward similar collaborations in the future? I certainly welcome all the efforts that are now taking place in schools in the north-east and elsewhere in Scotland to make clear to pupils the very real opportunities that exist in the oil and gas sector. Indeed, as recently as December, the study that was done fueling future report that was found that the sector in Scotland was identifying a need in the next five years for 12,000 new entrants into the industry. The opportunities in the oil industry, although you might not know it from the tone of what is said from some quarters of the chamber about the oil industry, are the opportunities in the oil sector in Scotland that are very real indeed. Does the minister agree that it is a simple way to encourage pupils to consider careers in the oil and gas industry and that it is to target teachers to understand the skill shortages and job opportunities that exist in the sector and that programmes like your future energy are already helping to encourage young people to consider careers in the industry? As the member says, encouraging awareness among teachers is of course very important. For that reason, Energy Skills Scotland ran three oil and gas career events for schools last year, aimed at young people and their teachers, with events at Ayrshire College, Forth Valley College and Inverness College. Those events involve teachers and pupils from around Scotland. Further events are planned, with the very important aims that the member mentions very much in mind. To ask the Scottish Government to confirm whether it has met targets for full-time equivalent places at our colleges. I am pleased to say that colleges have again exceeded their target. Latest figures show that colleges delivered 119,636 funded places in 2013-14, while over the target of 116,000. Could the cabinet secretary outline how many students from the most deprived areas in Scotland are studying for recognised qualifications at college? I am pleased to say that, in 2013-14, 33,439 students from Scotland's 20 per cent most deprived areas were studying full-time or substantive part-time courses, leading to recognised qualifications. That is an increase of around 1,800 students compared with 2006-07. Colleges have always delivered strongly for deprived communities. That is why the programme for government makes clear that we have a crucial role in helping us to meet our ambitions to widen access to higher education. To ask the Scottish Government what the average college bursary funding is compared with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In 2014-15, a full-time 19-year-old further education student at college in Scotland could receive a bursary of up to £4,000 per year plus access to discretionary funding. Making direct comparisons is complicated, but we have data showing that, in contrast, a full-time 19-year-old further education student in England could receive up to £1,200 per year and up to £1,500 in Wales and up to £2,092 in Northern Ireland. Along with Wales and Northern Ireland, Scotland has continued with educational maintenance allowance of £30 a week, although the scheme has been scrapped in England by the Westminster Government. Neil Findlay. According to what we have heard during this session from the minister, the cabinet secretary today, colleges are doing better, teacher numbers aren't being cut, college buildings are all fine, student numbers are up and students are all very well supported. No doubt the cabinet secretary believes in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny 2. While the cabinet secretary showed just a glimmer of empathy and acknowledged that FE students who are expected to live on at best between £30 a week and £93 a week are having major difficulties affording transport, food and the basics that they need to complete their course, is that not really the case that support in Scotland is the poorest across the UK? Presiding Officer, we can always rely on Mr Findlay to lower the tone, because I was expecting him to come to the chamber with some facts that compare college bursary funding between students in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland and Wales. Of course, he has absolutely failed to do that. Instead, we have his usual empty rhetoric. I asked NUS Scotland for the comparative data that Mr Findlay failed to provide. Unfortunately, NUS Scotland does not have that comparative data, but I can say that, with regard to students in Scotland, they continue to receive EMA, unlike South of the Border. Under 18-year-olds can receive up to £36 a week. 18-to-25-year-olds can receive up to £73 a week. That can equate up to £4,000 a year. Of course, for students, full-time students, they can receive up to £93 a week, which can be as much as £6,300 over the year. When you try to get to the detail, Presiding Officer, to compare that with the South of the Border, it is very difficult. What we can see is that they have no educational maintenance allowance. They have a vulnerable student bursary for young people in care, as opposed to having a wider catchment area based on entitlement, and they have some discretionary funding. Comparisons are very difficult, but I was really hoping that Mr Findlay would come to this chamber with some facts, as opposed to rhetoric. What else can we expect? That concludes portfolio questions. I will give a few seconds for members to change places for the next item of business.


Yr cyfnod o'i wneud i gael ei fod yn credu fawr gwwysig a ran y bydd yn gymhiliadol iawn, ac oedd yn cyfrofiad o'r gyfnod preferred ar gyfer y gwirwyr ar gyfer yw peth. Felly mae'n dweud i'r cyrdin nhw, mae'n ei fod yn ymwneud o'r cyfnod sydd yn cymoeddol iawn i gwirwyr yn y Gwyrdd ac i'n sefydlu mewn ni, a'r cyfnod tensionsio aethau o'i gwaith, a'r cyfnod ein hyn yn gwybeth na'n dwynghiaeth, Cymru o'r cyfwyr a mae gwybod yma'r FFAP. Yn gweithio i bwysig am hynny i agaf weld yma. Rwy'n gofio'r T100, 200 a 300. Rwy'n gofio'r ddiddorol o 3 gydag o'r rei. Rwy'n gofio'r ddiddorol o'r cyfwys. Rydyn ni'n gilydd i'r oedd ymddangas ar y clyw. Rydyn ni'n gilydd i'r oedd yma'r ffordd. Ond ydych chi'n gilydd i'r oedd yn ddannu. Yn gilydd i'r oedd yn ysgrifennu ar yr oedd gwybod. rhaid i'w ddaeth gyda'r cyfnod drwy gyd, ac rhaid i'n ddechrau'n cael eu cyfnod o'r cwrs. Dwi'n dweud yma'r T100. Y T100 yn ddaeth i'r cyffredin iawn arall, ac mae'n mynd i'ch gweithio'r ddweud yma, mae'n pethau gwaith yn ei ffordd, yn ei ddwyllfa, mae'n llwydd gael. Mae'r 34 oed yn cyfnod o'r 7 iawn, ond yn gymryd i'r bromig i'r cwrs 3. I'm not going to talk too much about the tech that Taelist have said is in these, it's there if you want it in terms of videos that are already out there, so I'm not going to repeat that. But what I will say, let's start off with dry ball data and interesting for me was that 34 degrees worth of loft and these were the numbers that it produced. And surprisingly, ball speed is very, very good, 119 and very consistent, apart from that final ball you see there. Again, as you'd expect it, or maybe not for me, but this is a very high spinning club and carry distance is the shock at 163. Launched at 2110 peak height, so very, very high in terms of peak height and carry was the surprise. 163 out of a 34 degree, 7 iron is a lot longer than I'd expected to be. It defied its loft in my hands. Surprisingly so, like I said, I would expect that kind of loft to achieve a sort of just over 150 carry. That's what I've done with other 7 irons of this type. So a bit confused is that the loft versus carry distance, so obviously something going on in there in terms of a bit of fire off that face. And the spin number was again impressively high if that's kind of thing floats your boat. But I'm going to talk about when I get that out on the course very shortly how sometimes that high spin number can also have some negative impacts as well. Anyway, let's get out on the course. I tried them in a number of situations and the first one you will see is literally shorts of a green in a bit of a chip and run. And nothing great to highlight here apart from the fact where you see this ball rises sort of four or five feet off the floor. When you see me try this with the other two irons that we're looking at in this video, you'll see. It's the only one place where you really visibly see the difference in the loft of the three clubs. But anyway, great feel. I said great feel, good feel. I don't think this is anything like a forge club that's always used in Mizuno as the barometer because of their title. Nothing feels like a Mizuno. Well in this case it doesn't. It for me hasn't got that softness of a real true forge. It's not got that same kind of feel at all. So I'd class it as good but not great by any stretch at all. Irons are played in here. It was a windy day down at Conway Golf Club and I always talk about this about this obsession with spin amongst average golfers. Yes, it can have benefits in terms of it needs to be at a level to look at stopping balls on greens. But in this case with the T100 out there on the course, I found the ball flight was a little bit too floaty for me. The 34 degrees it was a weak ball flight. And the spin number obviously worked against it playing into the wind and downwind. Well you ain't stopping nothing on links greens downwind no matter what the spin number says. And that's the interesting fact for me. I don't know what conditions people play in. But the reality is out on the golf course the spin number was almost removed and it was a negative because playing into the wind it became very very difficult to get the ball progressing. And you see a large drop off between that and the other clubs that I tested. But anyway my overall assessment, I'd say okay without ticking. I never left there feeling anything fantastic about this club. It's an okay performer. I'll only want to remove it from it. It's got AP2 written all over it from last or previous year's models. That's all I would say on that one. Next club in let's go to the far end of the spectrum which is a T300. And again I don't want to remove away from the AP models. This is the effectively the AP1. It's again it's a thick top line. It's overall a bulkier club. Looks wise I mean I don't know I'd be really interested in your feedback on this. I'm kind of unsure about looks. Maybe growing me a little bit the three of the clubs. But again I think it might be a bit of a marmite look. It's quite different and unique in terms of what Titlist have done again. I think trying to move away from the traditional looks. I'm not sure. In this again I think it's an okay looking club. Top line and all the different colours of crumbs on the top line itself. And the chamferedges make it. They're doing everything they can to make this appeal. Visually appear rather. Visually like a thinner top line.  First of all let's have a look again those chips into the green. Very very low this way you see the loft changing. It's 29 degrees sorry the loft on this. So right at the other end of the spectrum. But again decent enough feel. It's a more clicky feel than you'd expect from the forge club. It certainly feels a little bit springy. But I'm not negative towards that. I actually quite liked it what they've done with the T300. Then again balls into the wind again. This is where for me yes it's stronger lofted. But it achieves a distance that it maintains from that more penetrating ball flight. It's not a low launching 7 iron bite any means. And again it just cut through the wind. It was lower spinning. But it certainly did a job and downwind like I said.  It travelled quite a bit further out there on the course. Then it did in terms of the difference between it and the T100. In terms of dry ball data. And let's still the dry ball data up for you now. So don't forget there the averages. And it's the longer of the three clubs again. As you'd expect from the loft. 174 or 175 or almost carry. Spin drops off at 55. But again more than respectable for me based on all the tests that I do. Ball speed like I said was higher at 122. There are more variables in there for people who are thinking that consistency is an issue perhaps with this. Then yeah I would say we've got a ball speed of 118. And a ball speed of 128 would you believe in there. So there are some differences. Pkite at 103 so again it still launches the ball. Although it's slightly lower in launch angle at 17.8. It gets to an incredibly high peak height. Like I said what I noticed out there on the course transferring that. Where it really matters I think. Is that certainly in the conditions that I played in at Conway yesterday. It was absolutely superb in terms of performance both into and downwind. And I never had. I thought it was a good good performer. And for average golfers I think this is a really really good product. I never did the AP1. Right now we will move on T200. The one that sits in the middle and it does exactly that. It just is it's a smaller version of the T300. And a bigger version of the T100. I like the look of this club. Again it's kind of grown on me when I say I like the look of it. Is quite different and unique from tight list. The performance you get from it. So the loft first of all let's go the other way around loft is 30 degrees.  So again pretty much exactly where you'd expect it to be. 170 carry. Which is bang on the button for this kind of loft. 6000 spin which is really really good for me. 121 ball speed. A lot more consistent across on the ball speeds there than we've seen from the T300. Launching again very very similar launch angle to that of the T100. Peak height was identical in terms of average at 110. Out there on the course again the short game chipping in. It has got a sort of clicky feel but again nothing that is offensive to me. It gives feedback into the hands and you can react to that feedback as well. It's nice and easy to bit the ball up. I thought again a more penetrating ball flight than that of the T100 in my hands. And again preferred it. It did again pretty much what I'd be looking for from that type of iron. A sort of iron that sits in the middle of the two. It was an overall good performer. But I'm going to get to a summary because I feel already that I'm waffling on with this review. Because there's an underlying tone to it and that is that these clubs are okay. No they're not okay. These clubs are very very good. But the problem that I have is that the AP1, AP2 and AP3, the 718 range were also very very good. As much as titleists want to say these are not the same, they're a different setup and the technology's different, I find it hard to separate the three profiles from the three previous profiles. I find the characteristics of each club into the performance difficult to separate. I would guess that if I looked at my numbers now for each of those three products that I've just mentioned from the 718 range, apart from spin which is probably an improved number, I don't think there would be any difference. Someone take the time to go and have a look. But I don't think there will be any great differences. When I say I don't think there will, I took out, I played AP3s which was the one that sat in the middle because it mixed the numbers around a little bit. I played AP3 on the same day as I collected the dry ball data and it was virtually identical to that of the T200. That's the bit that I just, if you look at a set of clubs that fit any of these remits these are very very good clubs. If you've got 718 APs then you've no need to worry about changing whatsoever and it's just one of them ranges of clubs which there might be some people getting excited out there about these. I'm not in that category I'm afraid. I just think very very good. This is not a, this is where you've got to be careful with these reviews. I'm not knocking these clubs, they are really really good. It's not because I'm afraid to knock them, believe me I'll tell you if I don't think they're any good. They are very good but I can't get away from the fact that in the back of my mind they don't differ that greatly from the AP718 range in every category and I'm afraid that's my honest assessment of it, like it or not. I can't really say no more than that. I've not mentioned price because I'm not 100% where these are going to sit on the balance with you. My review is a day later than others because I got a bit confused over the embargo date so apologies for that. Hope you enjoyed it, like I said for me dry ball data is a fantastic barometer to measure clubs performance from and it's a good starting point but getting that out on the course is reality and it's a real eye open if I had just done a review based on dry ball data it might have been slightly different but when I got out there on the course and you see the differences in what happens in like I keep using the same word in reality when the wind's blowing, when conditions are different, when lies are different that's when you see the true performance of a golf club and to take the three different heads out to see the difference in the performance was really really good and for me if I was choosing a club to game I'd go to the opposite end of the spectrum and gain the T300 why wouldn't I? I keep saying this, it's packed with a bit of power, plenty of help spinning plenty high enough for me and that compared to that of the T100 I'd be far more sweet towards that easier option anyway I've waffled on more than I thought thank you for watching, comments down below interesting your feedback out of these, look what do you think of the performance what do you think of the review I'm going, see you later