Data cloud company Snowflake has unveiled new innovations to its data platform that will drive economic value for customers. The company made this announcement at its Snowday 2022 event, the final San Francisco stop on its Data Cloud World Tour. With new transparent performance enhancements across its single engine, Snowflake is now faster. Moreover, it improves how customers mobilize their data to run their most important workloads, the company said.

Snowflake is also advancing its cross-cloud Snowgrid capability, a technology layer that interconnects clouds and regions. It powers Snowflake’s collaboration, data governance and business continuity. These new improvements to Snowgrid enable customers to further streamline collaboration with richer experiences and privacy preserving controls. They can also automate data protections and expand the scope of replication for seamless failover.

Snowflake’s Christian Kleinerman

Christian Kleinerman is senior vice president of product at Snowflake.

“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,” Kleinerman said. “With one single product, we can innovate faster, and deliver improvements that enable our customers with a unified experience across clouds and regions, so they can protect their data at cloud scale, operate more efficiently and collaborate globally in new ways to further mobilize their data.”

Customer-Centricity

Regular improvements to its single elastic performance engine accelerate common queries, replication speeds, new use cases and more. Customers automatically gain more value for each credit, without having to take action. Snowflake’s latest improvements continue this trend of performance enhancements. They provide new visibility into the impact of optimizing performance.

Among the improvements are faster queries. With Query Acceleration Service, Snowflake will accelerate outsized queries by providing a burst of additional resources. It will do so without scaling up overall compute. Customers also get improved query efficiency with join elimination (generally available), alongside multiple improvements to search optimization for faster searches and point lookups.

New account usage details allow customers to run cost-benefit analysis of services more easily for auto-clustering and search optimization. Specifically, customers will be able to determine the magnitude and impact of data loads or modifications on tables. This is accomplished through new history views (private preview) and lower costs with search optimization now supporting column selection (public preview) for data optimized for searches. Additionally, customers can now analyze long running and time-consuming queries more easily. They can identify and resolve performance problems before they impact the end user through programmatic access to query metrics (private preview).

Better Cross-Cloud Capability and Collaboration

As organizations continue to scale their data needs, working with various teams, regions and clouds across the globe is imperative. Snowgrid empowers these organizations with one seamless and connected experience across globally distributed teams and businesses. It delivers results faster, unifies governance to comply with regulations and easily replicates more than just data for increased business continuity.

Snowflake is advancing cross-cloud collaboration to provide customers with increased flexibility when sharing data listings. Providers can share listings publicly or privately with global business ecosystems. Providers can also choose to make their data automatically available and actionable for consumers across supported regions and clouds.

New listing discovery controls (public preview) deliver fine-grain controls for providers to list data privately, making it easier to share and collaborate internally and externally while preserving privacy. Providers can customize listings and offer usage-based pricing, while consumers get more visibility into listings with usage and query examples, as well as categorizations.

By using cross-cloud auto-fulfillment (public preview), providers can make data immediately accessible and up to date for consumers, without manual intervention. Providers now have access to robust programmatic and visualized insights (public preview) to better understand how listings are accessed and used, in turn helping them deliver improved offerings and customer experiences.

Cross-Cloud Data Governance

Snowflake’s cross-cloud data governance simplifies governance at scale, helping organizations comply with international regulations and have unified visibility across their data ecosystem. Building on Snowflake’s extensive set of native data governance capabilities already available, new improvements include:

Cross-Cloud Business Continuity

To further simplify global operations, Snowflake enables customers to replicate data and more across clouds and regions, unlocking greater levels of resiliency and ensuring minimal business disruptions in the event of a disaster. New advancements include:

Partner Expansion

Organizers of Snowday 2022 also took time to recognize the value of Snowflake partners. Launched over two years ago, the Snowflake Partner Network continues to serve as the engine that fuels the growth of the data cloud ecosystem, unlocking the potential of the data cloud with a broad array of solutions, applications, and partners that help mobilize the world’s data.

Snowflake’s Colleen Kapase

Colleen Kapase is Snowflake’s SVP partners and alliances.

“The Snowflake Partner Network is at the heart of the exponential growth that Snowflake’s data cloud has experienced over the past year,” Kapase said. “Our partners continue to amaze us in how they leverage their capabilities and expertise to deliver powerful data-driven business outcomes to our joint customers. We look forward to continuing to strengthen the data cloud through our partners to deliver even more impact to customers.”