Snowflake unveils new features to improve data cloud consolidation

At its annual summit, California-based data cloud company Snowflake unwrapped a number of product innovations to optimise and empower the data cloud.  

The innovations include better ways of data programmability, global data governance, and platform optimisations to enable stronger data consolidation in the data cloud for better business insights.   

Within data programmability, Snowflakes has introduced Snowpark -- a developer platform that combines Java and Scala to provide a cross-language ability for the data engineers and scientists to execute workloads seamlessly within Snowflake. It further extended support on Snowflake for customers to bring their custom code and business logic and use Java UDFs (User Defined Functions) for smoother execution.  

Snowflake claims to have brought in a time-to-value model for unstructured data to be run alongside structured and semi-structured data for unlocking business opportunities. Al these features are presently available in a private preview with a promise of public preview soon.   

The company also announced global governance capabilities in the form of its classification capability that automatically detects personally identifiable information (PII) in a given table and leverages the tagging framework to annotate the data, allowing role-based policies to be used to control access to the data. Another capability launched under this category included Anonymized views that refer to the ability to protect privacy and identity in a dataset, while still retaining its analytical value. 

The summit also included bits on the optimisation of the Snowlake platform with improved storage economics and support for interactive experiences wtihin the platform through 6x improvement on query throughput on a single compute cluster; and up to an 8x improvement in average query duration for those workloads. 

Earlier this year, Snowflake partnered with Mumbai-headquartered mid-tier information technology (IT) solution and services provider Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI) for a data transformation programme.