Snowflake data cloud platform continued to expand its capabilities in 2021 by adding updates to sharing data. Data pipelines and snowsight partners/customers access and mobilize their data for good data-driven outcomes.
Let’s know some of the most exciting announcements of Snowflake from 2021.
Data Sharing:
Snowflake makes it easy for companies to securely share granular data across the ecosystems of their business and reducing risk factors in the traditional sharing methods. Snowflake had announced new data sharing capabilities and support for GCP data exchanges in January 2021.
Data Marketplace of Snowflake Extended to GCP:
Snowflake data marketplace gives analytics, business intelligence, and data science professionals who deserve decision making in data-driven with 375+ data sets. Snowflake had announced a public preview of the data marketplace hosted on GCP. It’s easy to go to the data marketplace of Snowflake for all the users of Snowflake who have accounts hosted on GCP.
Core Platform:
Snowflake data cloud platform from an outlet in order to take advantage of the unique cloud attributes. Snowflake is capable of unwavering performance, massive scale, good data governance, superior economics and security. Among the recent updates of the Snowflake data cloud platform to the core platform is GA support for external tables, simplified account administration, and expanded availability of Snowsight.
Snowsight in GCP regions:
The interface of Snowsight enables entire companies to move the data quickly to insights through rich visualizations, collaboration, and ad hoc analytics. For example, it’s easy for the customers to create usage dashboards and billing to monitor and compute the resources of the Snowflake platform. Earlier, the Snowflake data cloud platform was only available to regions on Microsoft Azure or AWS cloud platforms.
Simplified administration with new companies format and object:
Organizations/companies are the top-class Snowflake objects that link all the entity’s accounts released in January 2021. Companies help the customers of Snowflake simplify billing and account management, data sharing, database replication and few other tasks related to account administration. The companies’ feature introduces a role called ORGADMIN, enabling all the administrators to create accounts across the cloud platforms and Snowflake-supported regions.
In order to simplify account names of the management for exiting and new accounts, Snowflake has introduced a new preview for the unique identification of accounts. An account identifier is needed for the URLs and some other places.
Data Lake:
Snowflake offers flexible solutions for companies willing to enhance or enable their data lake strategies. Snowflake delivers quick extensible data pipelines, query performance, and secure collaboration to help the companies unleash the complete potential of the data. Snowflake continued to extend capabilities for external tables with GA support. Opting Snowflake training will help you to know more details about the data lake.
External tables improve queries of a data lake:
External tables are unable for the users looking to augment the data lake existing to query the data without ingesting it into Snowflake. Users also can choose in creating external table materialized views in order to speed up the query performance. From January 2021, Snowflake made the external table support available generally and also it added support for ADSL (Azure Data Lake Storage) Gen2. Now, the users can directly query data with external tables. Besides, this release includes the ability to stream creation on external tables.
Data Pipelines:
Data pipelines are used to automate the manual steps involved in optimizing and transforming automated data flow, enabling smooth data and continuous data loads. Snowflake has released new external features in January 2021 that provide external data pipeline support.
External functions for Microsoft Azure and AWS APIs:
External functions of the Snowflake enable the users to leverage business logic services to interact by bringing the data to the places where computation occurs. Initially, Snowflake had announced this feature for regional endpoints calling through the gateway of AWS in June 2020. Also, in February 2021, the features of external functions are available for Microsoft Azure API management and AWS API gateway. One can easily extend the data pipelines by just calling third-party libraries or external services, sometimes enabling new exciting cases like geocoding, external tokenization, scoring data with pertained machine learning models etc. With the support for Microsoft Azure API management, companies having resources running on Microsoft Azure and Snowflake deployment can ensure the gateway running on Azure.
Ecosystem:
Usually, Snowflake with a vast array of technologies and industry-leading tools, enabling users to access the platform with an extensive ecosystem of programming languages, drivers, connectors, and tools. Besides, Snowflake announced asynchronous support for Python.
Conclusion:
I hope this article helps you to know the features of Snowflake that were released in January 2021. Any queries regarding Snowflake features? Comment below. Happy Learning!
Author Bio:
I’m Anji Velagana; a B.Tech graduate who turns into Freelance Content Writer & Pursuing Masters in Journalism & Mass Communication with Passion. Contact me: Linkedin.