Snowflake updates to better interoperability using AI

Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, has unveiled significant advancements at its annual user conference. These updates enhance the platform’s flexibility and interoperability, empowering thousands of organizations to leverage their enterprise data more effectively.

Snowflake introduces Iceberg Tables, now generally available, to bring ease of use, performance, and governance to externally stored Iceberg data. This innovation allows companies like Booking.com and Capital One to simplify data operations and support diverse use cases, from data lakehouses to AI and machine learning applications.

Snowflake Horizon offers robust governance and discovery capabilities. The new Internal Marketplace (in private preview) enables teams to curate and publish data products securely. Universal Search, now generally available, uses advanced search engine technology to help users find and utilize relevant data efficiently. These features ensure that organizations can manage their data with high compliance, security, and privacy standards.

It continues to enhance platform performance, reducing query duration by 27% and improving data loading speeds by up to 50% for Parquet files. These improvements lower operating costs and enhance user experience without requiring additional customer actions. To meet regional regulatory requirements, the company is expanding its AI Data Cloud footprint with an EU-only data boundary and a secure environment for Department of Defense (DoD) customers. This ensures stronger data residency and sovereignty assurances for European customers and IL4 security controls for DoD users.

Snowflake also announced new advancements to Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowflake ML, along with a collaboration with NVIDIA to build customized AI data applications. These updates highlight Snowflake’s commitment to driving enterprise AI forward and supporting developers with cutting-edge tools and technologies.