Snowflake announced new features to enable Snowflake customers to work with more types of data, have a more powerful developer experience, deliver more control over data, and access data services within the Data Cloud. Features include:
Unstructured Data – In addition to structured and semi-structured data, Snowflake announced support for unstructured data such as audio, video, pdfs, imaging data and more – which will provide the ability to orchestrate pipeline executions of that data. Unstructured data management in Snowflake means customers will be able to avoid accessing and managing multiple systems, deploy fine-grained governance over unstructured files and metadata, and gain more complete insights. This feature is currently in private preview.
Snowpark – A new developer experience that will allow data engineers, data scientists, and developers to write code in their languages of choice, using familiar programming concepts, and then execute workloads such as ETL/ELT, data preparation, and feature engineering on Snowflake. Snowpark is currently available in testing environments only.
Data Services on Snowflake Data Marketplace – Snowflake Data Marketplace enables any Snowflake customer to discover and access live, ready-to-query, third-party data sets from more than 100 data providers, without needing to copy files or move the data. Now the marketplace also features data service providers.
Row Access Policies – Customers will be able to advance their data governance across all data objects and workloads in Snowflake. Row access policies will give Snowflake customers the ability to create policies for restricting returned result sets when queries are executed. Row access policies are designed to mitigate risk, improve governance, and help organizations better adhere to regional and industry-specific data privacy regulations. Snowflake’s row access policies feature is expected to be in private preview later this year.
