When the US company, Snowflake, started nine years ago, its founders built a data solution to harness the power of the cloud. They created the Data Cloud — a global network where organisations could mobilise their data on a virtually unlimited scale. This meant organisations no longer needed a number of data silos scattered throughout their offices and subsidiaries – they could use Snowflake instead because of its sheer scale.
Today, Snowflake announced it now supports Python – the fastest growing programming language – within Snowflake as part of Snowpark, Snowflake’s developer framework. This will mean developers can collaborate on data in their preferred language. At the same time, they can leverage Snowflake’s platform to build scalable, optimised pipelines, applications, and machine learning workflows.
Snowpark still supports Java and Scala, allowing users to have different languages and different users all working together against the same data with one processing engine, without needing to copy or move the data. This helps developers because it gives them flexibility and a simpler environment which requires less administrative work and maintenance.
SVP of Product at Snowflake Christian Kleinerman said: “Snowflake has long provided the building blocks for pipeline development and machine learning workflows, and the introduction of Snowpark has dramatically expanded the scope of what’s possible in the Data Cloud.”
“As with Snowpark for Java and Scala, Snowpark for Python is natively integrated into Snowflake’s engine so users can enjoy the same security, governance and manageability benefits they’ve come to expect when working with Snowflake. As we continue to focus on mobilising the world’s data, Python broadens even further the choices for programming data in Snowflake, while streamlining data architectures,” Kleinerman added.
Canva’s Head of Platforms says it’s easier to grow with Snowflake
At a media launch for Snowpark for Python this week, Canva’s Head of Data Platforms Greg Roodt said Canva is taking advantage of the technologies Snowflake provides. He said Canva had previously been with a platform with “fixed costs” and this became difficult as Canva grew in size so quickly: “Canva has obviously grown tremendously,” said Roodt.
“Our rate of growth is high but Snowflake supports us – we don’t have those awkward conversations we used to with our previous vendor,” Roodt said. “With Snowflake we’re able to pay for what we use and keep adding to that if we need more capacity.”
Novartis works with Snowflake
Global Head of Digital Platform & Product Delivery at Novartis Loic Giraud said they’re using Snowflake because: “… the flexibility and scale of Snowflake’s Data Cloud allows us to accelerate our pace of knowledge through data interpretation and insight generation, bringing more focus and speed to our business. Bringing together all available data ultimately unlocks more value for our employees, patients, and health care providers, and data science innovations help us realise this goal.”
With Snowpark for Python, data teams can:
- Accelerate their pace of innovation using Python’s familiar syntax and ecosystem of open-source libraries to explore and process data where it lives.
- Optimise development time by removing time spent dealing with broken Python environments with an integrated Python package dependency manager.
- Operate with improved security by eliminating ungoverned copies of data with all code running in a secure sandbox inside Snowflake.
New developments within Snowflake include:
- Cross-cloud account replication: Expanding Snowflake’s native database replication including everything from identity and role-based access controls to governance policies to resource monitors, can now be synchronised across clouds and regions for availability while ensuring point in time consistency with the primary region.
- Improved replication performance: Increased efficiency of data replication capabilities has resulted in up to a 55% performance improvement as experienced by one of Snowflake’s largest customers, which in turn translates in up to a 55% reduction in customer replication costs since Snowflake customers only pay for what they use.
- Expanded governance capabilities and integration: New capabilities like lineage visibility in Access History (private preview) and Object Dependencies, help compliance teams track and understand sensitive data. Snowflake’s native governance capabilities and new Governance Accelerated Program support an entire ecosystem of partner-delivered solutions and integrations to help customers discover and protect data.
- Snowpark: Stored Procedures to define, execute, and schedule complex application code entirely within Snowflake with no separate client to manage.
- Snowpark: Unstructured File Processing using Java functions directly within Snowflake, leveraging its performance, scale, and security, and unlocking new use cases including image classification, natural language processing, audio transcription, and more.
- Snowpark: Logging Framework to help improve development productivity with easier monitoring and debugging.
About Snowflake: Snowflake enables organisations to mobilise their data with Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Customers use the Data Cloud to unite siloed data, discover and share data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a data experience that spans multiple clouds and geographies. You can find out more at snowflake.com or sign up for Snowflake’s SnowDay event to hear about the latest advancements in the Data Cloud in keynotes, expert deep dives, and customer sessions.
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