Everything You Missed at Snowflake Summit 2021
The most impactful product updates and new features
Overview
By now most everyone in the technology world has probably heard of Snowflake. Since its record-breaking IPO in 2020, it has continued to extend its lead data, cloud, and SaaS space. Last week, Snowflake held its annual “Snowflake Summit” conference. With it, came a variety of announcements and new features. Here are some of the key takeaways from the event:
Data Programmability
Snowflake showcased a variety of new features and made multiple announcements, but the most impactful features and announcements were around data programmability.
- Serverless Tasks “private preview” — operations can now be scheduled automatically with the appropriate resources
- Unstructured data “private preview” — unstructured data support
- Snowflake Scripting “private preview” — SQL can now be used to create functions and stored procedures
- Schema Detection “public preview” — supports Parquet, Avro, and ORC file formats
- SQL API “public preview” — this new API enables Snowflake access through a REST API to send requests and retrieve results
- JAVA UDFs (user-defined functions) “private preview” — this gives users the ability to leverage custom business logic or external third party libraries within Snowflake
- Snowpark “private preview” — data engineers, developers, and data scientists can now write code in their own language of choice
Anonymized Views
While the GA date for this upcoming feature is pending, Snowflake said that it would be available for private preview in the coming months. Luckily we were given a brief taste as to what this new feature would entail in the data governance session which can be found in the recordings for Snowflake Summit. Ultimately, Anonymized Views help to protect personal data while retaining the overall analytical value which can be used by broader teams and partners. To be specific, this feature can be used to create a saved masked view of data to share with appropriate users. What’s really cool is that the creation of a view does not change the base table. Additionally, the view updates when the table changes and maintains the data masking inputs. Once a view is created specific access can be granted based on the appropriate policies created within the Snowflake environment.
Platform Optimization
One of the great things about SaaS services like Snowflake is that the engineering team is constantly innovating and releasing new features and capabilities into the service. Snowflake is no exception; recently, they made some changes to the storage capabilities to further compress data. This has resulted in cost savings across the board for all customers and will be rolled out on all newly written data.
Likewise, visualizing average compute resources and overall allocation has been a constant challenge for Snowflake customers across the board. We actually created two open-source utilities “Snowflake Estimator” & “Snowflake Healthcheck” to help address this issue, so it is really nice to see Snowflake taking this problem into their own hands with the new administrative experience they are rolling out.
This new feature is available in public preview and will help to simplify and monitor Snowflake usage across accounts by providing users with a dashboard to view consumption and warehouse usage. Similarly, alerts and notifications can be implemented to provide real-time monitoring of specific warehouses. It is really easy to give users and roles access to specific warehouses as well, because Snowflake has also created a simple hierarchy to visualize them to pair along with this new feature.
Data Marketplace Changes
Data sharing is one of the core capabilities of Snowflake. The ability for Snowflake users to discover and transact with data providers to leverage and purchase data directly is super valuable.
Snowflake has increased the overall availability of data sets in the marketplace by 76%.
The pricing models have been changed as well. One of the key challenges for the data marketplace has always been determining the value of the data. Snowflake is now offering a “try before you buy” feature to allow users to access sample data before purchasing. Likewise, Snowflake is also implementing three new pricing models:
- Usage only (consumer only pays for the queries they run)
- Fixed only (unlimited queries for a fixed monthly cost)
- Fixed +usage (consumer pays a fixed price for any queries they run based on a combination of the above to pricing models)
ServiceNow Integration
While there is no confirmed date, Snowflake said that they would be releasing a private preview to ServiceNow integration. This integration will give customers the ability to work with ServiceNow data in near real-time within Snowflake. This should improve overall data democratization and help to remove data silos. The other major benefit of this announcement lies in Snowflake’s built-in data sharing capabilities.
Alation Integration
For most organizations, data governance and security are at the forefront of every decision, so it was really refreshing to see some new announcements in this sector. Snowflake announced a new integration with Alation in the coming months. This integration will help users create and manage governance policies and audit workflows within Snowflake. Unfortunately, there was not a ton of information around this announcement, however, Alation did give a brief demo of the overall capabilities in the “What’s New: Governance in Snowflake” session which can be found in the Snowflake Summit recordings.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you liked the highlights that stood out to us. The ultimate goal was to provide a high-level overview of all of the new updates and product features announced at Snowflake Summit.
If you have any questions about Snowflake don’t hesitate to reach out. Recently, we benchmarked Snowflake along with the other top cloud data platforms to see how they compared across 33 dimensions. Here is a link to the workshop if you would like to set up a time to review the analysis.
At Hashmap, we work with our clients to build better, together.
If you’re considering moving data and analytics products and applications to the cloud or if you would like help and guidance and a few best practices in delivering higher value outcomes in your existing cloud program, please contact us.
Hashmap, an NTT DATA Company, offers a range of enablement workshops and assessment services, cloud modernization and migration services, and consulting service packages as part of our Cloud service offerings. We would be glad to work through your specific requirements. Reach out to us here
