A curated list of new Snowflake features released at Snowflake Summit 2020

Snowflake and Salesforce going live with their strategic partnership, Salesforce connectors coming to Snowflake, external functions, data masking support. New Web UI's going live. The list goes on. Read the following article for a curated list of new features released on Snowflake Summit 2020 a.k.a. virtual "Say Hello To The Data Cloud" -event.

Trying to go through for all the announcements for a product can be sometimes overwhelming. It takes time as you need to go through for all the individual press announcements. To ease the pain, I’ve gathered a curated list of new Snowflake features released at the second annual Snowflake Summit or as it was this year branded as “Say Hello To The Data Cloud” -event due to the event being virtual. Snowflake Summit will be held in 2021 at Caesars Forum, Las Vegas at June 7-10th.

So let’s begin.

Snowflake released new features which can be split down into to following categories: Salesforce partnership, Core Database features and UI features. I’ll list the features by categories and give a more precise description of the features released (if possible).

Salesforce strategic partnership

Most significant news this year was the announced Salesforce partnership. Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman announced together with Salesforce COO and President Bret Taylor the partnership which has been under the works for a while. The first results of this partnerships are the better integration between Salesforce and Snowflake.

Salesforce connectors

The first two visibles feature from Salesforce partnership are now released Einstein Analytics connectors will enable you to use Snowflake data directly at Einstein Analytics and the Einstein Analytics Outbound Connector for Snowflake for loading data into Snowflake.

Core Database functions

External functions

This function is going to unlock so much potential when used with DataOps tools (for example Agile Data Engine). At first sight, external functions might sound that they just add something to existing functions functionality. In reality, external functions enable you to trigger anything in Azure, AWS or Google Cloud if it’s reachable through their API Gateways. To be more precise, you can, for example, create function into Snowflake which will trigger Power BI dataset refresh through Azure API Gateway. This will mean that you can create a data pipeline which will refresh your Power BI reports right after your publish tables have been refreshed using only SQL and DataOps tool or in Snowflake – streams and tasks.

More information: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/external-functions.html

Search optimization service

You could call search optimization service as Snowflake’s answer to indexes. Basically you can define table-by-table basis when you want to Snowflake to pre-compute table information to used and enable faster queries for smaller dataset with smaller warehouses. More information: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/search-optimization-service.html

Support for SQL in stored procedures

As the title says, support for SQL procedures is finally coming. JavaScript has been the chosen language for Snowflake stored procedures, but honestly, we’ve been missing SQL.

Geospatial support

As the title says, Geospatial support is now coming to Snowflake. More information: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/data-types-geospatial.html

Richer resource monitoring alerts to Slack and Teams

Resource Monitoring is getting richer and more useful as you can create richer resource monitoring rules and you can finally direct those alerts to Slack and Teams natively.

Programming language extensibility

You can use in the future your chosen language in the user-defined functions. The first language to be supported is going to be Java and Python support is coming. Snowflake is going also to support popular coding paradigms, in this case, Snowflake is going to support data frames with Python.

Dynamic data masking support

Data masking is nothing unusual, but finally, Snowflake has built-in support for data masking internally and with tokenization through external functions. You can now mask columns which include for example social security numbers and you can trust that to numbers are hidden from admins as well. In the age of GDPR – the possibility reduce the footprint of personal data within your databases has become a vital asset in your data toolset.

UI features

New UI’s going live and also new admin view

The Numeracy acquisition was released at March 2019 https://www.snowflake.com/blog/numeracy-investing-in-our-query-ui/ and on last year Summit we got a glimpse of the new UI and it’s now been rolled out to Snowflake customers. New Query UI will enhance the user experience with predictive typing and live data charts. The Admin UI will, for example, give more insights about Snowflake credits costs. Sadly, we will not yet get the possibility to see how much pre-bought credits have been used.

Data Marketplace
Snowflake Data Marketplace which was announced last year is now live. You can now make your data available for other to consume and data consumers can use that data as part of their data pipelines as they would use normal SQL tables. More information: https://www.snowflake.com/data-marketplace/

Hopefully, this list helps you to get a grasp on things to come on Snowflake landscape.

More information by Christian Kleinerman:
https://www.snowflake.com/blog/snowflakes-product-innovations-for-2020/

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