Recently, InterWorks had the exciting opportunity to attend the very first Snowflake Summit ever! The sold-out conference was held June 3-6 in San Francisco, and with over 2000 attendees, it was obvious that people were eager to learn more about Snowflake and its plans for the future.
Supporting Partners at Snowflake Summit
In addition to supporting Snowflake as a Silver Sponsor, we were also able to hear from several shared clients, including Fortescue Metals and the San Francisco Giants. Solutions Lead Ben Young led a hands-on lab session as part of the Analytics track in which he explained how to increase the speed, scalability and management of your data with Snowflake.
Beyond celebrating client success and educating users on how to optimize their analytics, the Snowflake Summit was also a great time for reconnecting with partners. We were able to catch up with Matillion, Fivetran, DataRobot, Dataiku and Tableau among others! People are the crux of our work, and having the chance to cultivate relationships with existing and prospective clients and partners alike is always an added bonus of attending events like Summit.
Exciting Snowflake News
There were also lots of product announcements and general news at the Summit, including a message from Snowflake’s new CEO, serving as a true testament to Snowflake’s solid foundation and the immense growth potential of its future. One of the most exciting new developments is that Snowflake intends to release a version of the software that runs on Google Cloud. Adding the power of GCP to Snowflake’s current presence on AWS and Microsoft Azure is huge!
Other announcements included an ever-expanding list of Snowflake availability locations and providers; product and functionality enhancements, like recursive (or rather iterative) CTEs and new object types (table streams, IAM integration); and an entirely new Worksheets UI.
Four upcoming features deserve a bit more attention:
- Tasks (currently in open preview)
- Data Exchange (currently in private preview)
- External tables (currently in open preview)
- Worksheets
A Closer Look at New Features
With Tasks, you can create a SQL statement and schedule it to run, either at a specified time (using either interval or CRON-like notation) or after another task completes. Not all SQL statements can be executed on schedule, but most DML statements (e.g. INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE) are supported. Data Exchange is effectively a data marketplace, allowing companies like Nielsen and Experian (a.k.a. providers) that have data they’d like to share to easily connect and share it securely and in real time with companies to use in their own analyses.
External tables is a very exciting feature that effectively lets Snowflake query data stored on an external stage (e.g. S3) as if it were a database object. In essence, this positions Snowflake as a query engine for a data lake. Finally, through the acquisition of Numeracy, Snowflake is bringing rich new UI to Worksheets with dynamic data profiling features, autocomplete and some updated dashboarding functionality. New UI will be rolling out sometime later this year.
A Bright Future with Snowflake
The first Snowflake Summit was more than just a conference for us. We were honored to be named Snowflake’s Growth Solution Partner of the Year for 2019, and this recognition, in tandem with our attendance at Summit, further deepens our commitment to this innovative partner. We’re excited to look forward to the future of Snowflake and continue to support others in how they maximize their analytics process in collaboration with this data warehousing solution.
Above: InterWorks wins Snowflake Growth Solution Partner of the Year 2019
With lots of interest surrounding the power that can be unlocked when pairing Snowflake with Tableau, we’re thrilled to explore how we can continue to guide clients in modernizing their data warehousing solutions, build cutting-edge data engineering projects and ultimately help users make sense of their data.
Summit was a significant reminder of the power of the data community, the solid relationships within it and the revolutionary influence of Snowflake. To see how InterWorks can fit into your analytics process and assist you with your current data challenges, reach out and let’s begin a conversation!
