Snowflake Summit 2019: Highlights, Key takeaways, and more

Team Bigdata Dimension Labs participated in the Snowflake Summit 2019 where we were introduced to a whole new world of data and analytics. The Snowflake Summit 2019 was organized in San Francisco where the attendees were familiarized to ideas and techniques for promoting a data-driven culture through analytics, technology, people and processes.

The 3-day power packed summit witnessed over 2000+ attendees, 120+ sessions and 47 partners in Basecamp. Snowflake’s partners, customers and other industry peers gathered to network, collaborate and obtain essential knowledge about the company in general and various emerging trends in data and analytics in particular.

With the newly acquired knowledge on Snowflake’s new features, data and analytics, we are proud to say that Team Bigdata Dimension Labs will help you to orchestrate world-class solutions for your organization.

Here is a quick summary of the Snowflake Summit 2019:

Key Tactical Announcements

New shared data exchange experience

• An app store for data, to allow data providers to securely share public and personalized data in near real time.
• Ability to reach new customers and establish additional revenue streams by providing freemium data offerings and other value-added data services.
• Secured data sharing with granular controls for better governance and real-time access to live read-only data.
• Significant reduction in operational costs by eliminating data transfer and manual intervention.

We see this initiative as a paradigm shift in data sharing, read more about the Snowflake Data Exchange here.

Microsoft Azure Government

• Snowflake is now available on Microsoft Azure for Government.
• Federal customers can now enjoy the benefits of Snowflake on a dedicated Azure instance , restricted to the US government agencies and partners.

More information about this announcement can be found here

Integration with Google Cloud Platform and other cloud initiatives

• Integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and launching additional AWS and Azure regions.
• Advanced data replication across all Snowflake accounts with cross-region and cross-cloud replication features.
• New organization management options in Snowflake for managing multiple accounts, viewing usage & spending, and consolidating billing.
• New failover and fallback mechanism, which includes creating single client URLs for BI tools to failover without end-user disruption.

More on the strategic partnership between Snowflake and Google here.

Key Innovative Announcements

Agile Data Lake with materialized views, external tables

• Now you can build agile data lake with materialized view with different clustering keys, for rapid response to problems with quick detection of anomalies.
• External table can access the data stored from these formats with ease Csv, Json, Avro, Parquet, Orc & Xml
• Ability to define numerous materialized view Use External tables to store file level metadata about data files such as version identifier, partitioning information and file paths from data files in your cloud storage. This means, querying data in a data lake is now similar to querying data in a database.

Read more about Snowflake Materialized Views and automatic maintenance here and here.

Data pipeline and streaming

• Smooth and automated data flow without the need for manual intervention.
• Advanced data features for continuous, automated and cost-effective services for efficient data loading.
• Auto-Ingest feature to reduce the latency of queries and transforming the data as it arrives.
• Streams & Tasks to provide task scheduling mechanism for most common Snowflake SQL job.
• Snowflake connector for Apache Kafka platform for quick and reliable publishing of data, for storage and analysis.
• Snowflake Data Source for Apache Spark, for a fully managed, governed, and secure elastic cloud data warehouse.

For further reading, check out this blog and here

Modern query editor with data profiling

• Data profiling for processed query.
• Enhanced user experience with the unique and compelling query editor.
• Autocomplete and editing suggestions while writing SQL.
• BI tools like filtering options in-worksheet visualizations.
• Improved collaboration with an ability to share queries and visualizations.

Read more information about next generation query here

OAuth and Identity Management

• Client access to Snowflake on behalf of the user without the need to explicitly store credentials.
• Fine-grained access controls specific to a user and role.
• Complete auditability of client actions and long-lived access by the client to act on the user’s behalf.
• Implementation of Authorization Code flow for server-to-server applications or services.

More on the OAuth 2.0 security features here.

Data Replication & Custom user-defined data types

• Database replication allows to keep snowflake multiple cloud regions
• Custom user-defined data types for applications on Snowflake.
• Geospatial data types built using the new framework.

More detailed information about these features can be read here

What is in store for you?

Our overall experience at the Snowflake Summit 2019 was exemplary and as top valued partners of Snowflake, we are proud of the breakthrough innovation Snowflake brought about in the data and analytics landscape.

As one of Snowflake’s strategic partners with over 50+ certified professionals and cloud architects in our team, we promise to help you in building state-of-art solutions for your business and enable you to be cloud ready.

Whether it’s getting data into Snowflake or pulling insights out of it, our certified experts assess your needs, propose a modern data warehouse architecture, lead you through the migration process and ensure the success of your project. Setup your free Snowflake White-Boarding Session with our experts today to learn how these innovative features will enable your enterprise to be data driven.

How we do it

Bigdata Dimension Labs has formed a strategic partnership with Lyftron to build modern data hub on Snowflake in just few clicks to help enterprises with Netezza, Teradata, Hadoop and other legacy platforms migration to Snowflake, hybrid cloud management and BI acceleration. More information of these use cases can be read at the below solution brief.

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