Highlights:

  • Snowflake’s elastic performance engine, which essentially forms the core of the platform, is receiving a much-needed query acceleration feature.
  • Snowflake said that it would make the option to reduce joins on important columns widely available and would improve search optimization for quicker searches and point lookups.

As global enterprises continue to increase their reliance on data-driven decision-making, Snowflake is doing everything possible to make its data cloud the “platform of choice.”

At its annual Snowday event, the Montana-based firm – recognized for managing, among other workloads, data warehouse and data lake requirements – unveiled enhancements to its platform’s core components, including the elastic performance engine and Snowgrid technology. According to the company, the change would give organizations a speedier querying experience to improve the overall economics of the data cloud and enhance collaboration possibilities.

Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake, said, “Our success is predicated on our customers being successful when using Snowflake, which is why we continually strive to deliver improved performance and economic value for customers. With one single product, we can innovate faster and deliver improvements that give our customers a unified experience across clouds and regions, so they can protect their data at the cloud scale, operate more efficiently, and collaborate globally in new ways to further mobilize their data.”

Improvements for faster queries, saving money

Snowflake’s elastic performance engine, which essentially forms the core of the platform, is receiving a much-needed query acceleration feature. The innovation, presently in public preview, will assist businesses in accelerating portions of outsized searches (queries that require more resources than ordinary ones) by giving a burst of additional resources without the need to scale up overall computation. This would allow the execution of outlier queries without raising the company’s resource usage and associated costs.

In addition, Snowflake said that it would make the option to reduce joins on important columns widely available and would improve search optimization for quicker searches and point lookups. It has also introduced updated account use information, which makes it easier for businesses to do a cost-benefit analysis of the services.

For example, companies will be able to identify the magnitude and impact of data loading or adjustments on tables through fresh history views (currently private preview) and reduce expenses with search optimization, now allowing column selection (public preview) for data optimized for searches. Programmatic access to query metrics will allow teams to quickly examine long-running and time-consuming requests and discover and rectify performance issues before they affect the end user.

Snowflake’s cross-cloud Snowgrid improvements

Snowgrid enables the exchange of metadata, allowing all Snowflake regions to know each other via a unified, interconnected experience. With the newest enhancements, the firm is enhancing Snowgrid’s cross-cloud capabilities by focusing on collaboration, data governance, and business continuity.

Collaboration: Talking about collaboration, Snowgrid is receiving additional listing discovery controls and cross-cloud auto-fulfillment capabilities. According to the business, the former would make it easier for providers to exchange data listings while maintaining privacy, while the latter will allow them to make data instantly accessible and up-to-date for customers without manual involvement. The offers will be accompanied by enhanced analytics to aid providers in understanding how their listings are accessed and utilized.

Data governance: In a bid to improve cross-cloud governance and assist organizations in complying with foreign requirements, Snowflake is introducing automated data safeguards, where tag-based masking can automatically apply a specified policy to sensitive columns. Additionally, the business has enhanced search optimization by incorporating support for tables with masking and row access restrictions.

Business continuity: Snowflake is increasing its data replication capabilities to safeguard company continuity during a natural disaster. To achieve this, the firm is adding seamless pipeline failover that will guarantee that corporations’ streams and tasks are replicated along with their accounts, databases, rules, and metadata. Thus, their data pipelines will continue to function normally on secondary versions if something goes wrong.

Notably, Snowflake is also developing a new user interface that will make failover account replication easier to configure and administer.