Dive Brief:
- Snowflake unveiled a vendor-neutral database interoperability solution called Polaris Catalog at the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco Monday.
- Polaris Catalog aligns with the Apache Iceberg open-source data table format and API specifications, extending Snowflake’s multicloud integrations with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other major enterprise technology vendors. The metadata management toolkit will be open-sourced within 90 days, the company said.
- “Organizations want open storage and interoperable query engines without lock-in,” Christian Kleinerman, EVP of product at Snowflake, said in the release. Polaris Catalog can be deployed within Snowflake’s data cloud or on third-party infrastructure.
Dive Insight:
Snowflake built its business on helping enterprises manage growing data estates across multiple clouds and IT ecosystems. The company has also doubled down on big data’s newest enterprise ally, large language model technologies.
“AI is opening up enormous possibilities because, for the first time, every person in the organization can talk to their data in fluid natural language,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said during a Monday keynote.
The company bolstered its growing AI portfolio with the addition of Coda Brain, an enterprise-grade chatbot platform built into Snowflake’s Cortex model library and now in preview.
The natural language assistant is conversant in analytics, fine-tuned to company-specific data and capable of processing database queries for users without SQL skills, Ramaswamy said.
As Nvidia continues to extend its reach into the enterprise tech stack, Snowflake deepened its partnership with the chipmaker, integrating Nvidia’s software solutions and model-building microservices into its data cloud platform.
“We’re bringing high-performance computing to the data,” Nvidia President and CEO Jensen Huang said, during the keynote. “The amount of data that companies have in Snowflake is so gigantic, you can't move that somewhere else to do the processing.”
Snowflake’s enterprise accounts were recently hit by a wave of identity-based attacks against customers who failed to use two-factor authentication safeguards. While Ramaswamy did not mention the cyber incidents specifically, he stressed the need for heightened security around data and AI.
“Enterprises have been asking us for better ways to centralize security and access to their data,” Ramaswamy said. He pointed to the safety advantages of open-source tools that run on Apache Iceberg and let customers inject queries without moving data from place to place.
