Snowflake Summit 2022 Observations and Impacts
The second half of June brought the Snowflake 2022 Summit to Las Vegas. This annual event offers a wealth of information, product updates, and the opportunity to learn and collaborate with other Snowflake users.
This year’s theme was clear - Snowflake is much more than a data warehouse. Instead, it’s like the Internet - it’s about connections. In Snowflake’s case, it’s about the relationships between your information and data, no matter where that data resides.
This message could be found in nearly every keynote and session, in business-focused talks, and those centered around the platform's technology and implementation.
Business
Every business has data, and that data is precious to them. To unlock that information's enormous value, it needs to be connected and combined with data from outside sources.
Increasingly, we also need that data to be available immediately. Like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home, we want business data streaming and available at the snap of our fingers. That's the vision thatSnowflake is working to make real.
Even though that's what businesses want and need, they aren't always willing to give up the control of their information to get it. Sheila Jordan, Chief Digital Technology Officer for Honeywell, put it like this - "Data is like 'Linus's blanket.' Everyone wants their own, and they are very protective of it." The feeling among organizations is that services are all trying to "take their blanket."
Snowflake wants to enable you to use your data from wherever it is. Organizations should have a network of Linus blankets, all available to plug into, giving them new insights that allow them to streamline their automation.
Technology
That message came through clearly in the technical enhancements, and new offerings Snowflake announced during the week.
Enhancements
Snowflake announced a host of enhancements to the platform, including:
- 10% faster compute in AWS
- Efficiency improvements that can result in up to 10% cost reduction in storage
- Improvements to search optimization that increases efficiency by 20%
- Performance improvements making external parquet tables 2X faster
- 2X faster policy evaluations
- A decrease in compilation time by30%
- Substring searches twice as fast as before
New and Highlighted Features
We’ve collected just a few of the new features here to highlight Snowflake’s announced platform updates:
New workload management features were announced, including:
- Programmatic access to query profile statistics
- Workload insights with unique account usage views
- Budgets to help control costs and serverless performance services
- Consolidated usage views with tagging abilities for different accounts
External volumes - Snowflake has made other types of systems more available through the platform, allowing you to store your data where you want to and still use Snowflake’s features.
Support for Apache Iceberg Tables - Apache Iceberg was developed to address many of the challenges associated with object stores. With these updates, you can query Iceberg tables through Snowflake as if they were regular tables.
Stage sharing - Snowflake now supports sharing of stages as well as replication. Stages can be shared across regions or clouds, adding fail-safes as well as increased data management abilities and unstructured data usage.
Support for on-prem stores - On-premise storage that uses theS3 framework can now be interfaced with Snowflake, expanding your data surface beyond the cloud.
Streamlet - Snowflake’s acquisition of Streamlet will make in-platform coding of applications in Python possible, as well as the ability to publish those applications.
Our Favorite Tech InformationSession
It's hard to choose just one session as a favorite, but if we had to, it would be the Terraform session. Terraform empowers utilizing infrastructure as code, making managing all objects easier.
Terraform can manage the creation of all objects at the admin and data object levels. It can also manage privileges, including automating the creation of resource monitors.
One of the most exciting features isTerraform's ability to auto-generate dependencies. Terraform checks the state of objects and checks the new module block. It then creates a new object based on the resources. This works for multi-warehouses and multi-object creation, making it a powerful tool for managing all resources.
Summary
This is just a taste of the information and learnings available during this year's Snowflake Summit. It's clear thatSnowflake has a vision of the future of data agility, and they are building the features to make that future a reality.
Every year, Snowflake Summit is packed with useful information and announcements. We encourage Snowflake customers and those considering adopting the platform to take a look at some of the keynotes available to view on demand.
If you're looking for direction on how to useSnowflake in your business, download a copy of Big Compass's eBook, The Practical Guide to Snowflake for Data Agility.This informative resource will teach you about the power of the Snowflake platform, common use cases, mistakes to avoid, and how to get the most out of your Snowflake implementation.