Snowflake Unveils Data Innovations for AI Success & Streamlined App Development
Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, recently announced a series of groundbreaking data innovations aimed at driving customer success. The company’s focus lies in simplifying the data foundation, accelerating AI success, and scaling with applications. These releases are designed to fully harness the power of AI and integrate it seamlessly into the application development process.
Christian Kleinerman, SVP of product at Snowflake, highlighted the importance of a strong data foundation when it comes to AI strategy and application. In line with this, Snowflake has introduced enhancements to its Data Cloud platform that eliminate data silos and bring AI and app development directly to enterprise data.
One of the notable enhancements is the introduction of Iceberg Tables, which will soon be available for public preview. Iceberg Tables are a type of table that allow for streamlined management and optimal performance of Snowflake for data stored externally in the open standard Apache Iceberg format, without the need for upfront ingest cost. This innovation supports data architectures that require interoperability while retaining Snowflake’s ease of management and high performance.
In addition to Iceberg Tables, Snowflake also unveiled Snowflake Horizon, a comprehensive built-in governance solution. Snowflake Horizon offers a unified set of compliance, security, privacy, interoperability, and access capabilities that simplify app governance. With additional authorizations and certifications, data quality monitoring, data lineage UI, differential privacy policies, enhanced data classification, and a trust center interface for discovering security risks, Snowflake Horizon aims to provide a holistic and user-friendly approach to data governance.
Snowflake’s commitment to supporting AI app development shines through with their enhanced Python capabilities for Snowpark. These capabilities boost productivity, collaboration, and accelerate end-to-end AI and ML workflows. Snowflake Notebooks allow Python and SQL users to explore, process, and experiment with data in Snowpark within an interactive programming environment. The Snowpark ML Modeling API enables developers and data scientists to streamline model training and feature engineering, while the Snowpark Model Registry empowers secure deployment and management of models within Snowflake. Additionally, the Snowflake Feature Store assists in creating, storing, managing, and serving ML features for model training and inference.
Snowflake’s advancements in AI app development also encompass several other capabilities. The Snowflake Native App Framework simplifies app development using Snowflake’s building blocks. Snowpark Container Services allow for running app components without the need to move data or manage complex infrastructures. Finally, Database Change Management facilitates coding declaratively and templatizing work, making it easier for developers.
Introducing Snowflake Cortex, a fully managed service that enables enterprises to discover, analyze, and build AI apps in the Data Cloud. Snowflake Cortex focuses on securely extracting value from generative AI (GenAI). With serverless SQL/Python functions, organizations can quickly construct contextually enriched applications. Snowflake Cortex offers an extensive range of serverless functions, including large language models (LLMs) like Meta AI’s Llama 2 model. This empowers businesses to leverage the power of LLMs, build custom LLM-powered apps, and maintain control over their data, without requiring extensive AI expertise or complex infrastructures.
Snowflake is further expanding its capabilities with Snowflake Copilot, a virtual assistant powered by LLMs that enhances Snowflake coding tasks. Universal Search, another LLM-powered capability, enables searching across Snowflake accounts and native apps. Additionally, Document AI, an LLM-powered content extraction function, enhances document comprehension and overall efficiency.
Snowflake’s latest innovations pave the way for unprecedented advancements in data management, AI app development, and enhanced customer success. By providing a strong data foundation and cutting-edge AI building blocks, Snowflake empowers enterprises to create powerful AI and machine learning applications while ensuring data security and governance.
