Datascape Episode 52: Snowflake Snowday Updates Fall 2021

Episode 52 Shownotes

Welcome to another episode of the Datascape Podcast. In today’s show, we’ll recap the recent Snowday PR event and discuss some of the things that are in preview right now and will become available in 2022 for the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform. Our guest host is Sandeep Arora, Project Architect.

Warner starts us off with a list of some of the new features that Snowflake has added to its platform, including performance and compression ratio improvements, “two X better” external query performance on Parquet, and the deployment of bigger virtual warehouses. He later touches on Snowflake’s Time Travel recovery capability, Snowflake’s place in a tough competitive market and how to use direct client redirection capabilities.

Sandeep gives his take on the most beneficial improvement so far—a higher compression ratio—and why this translates to other long-term benefits. He later delves into the upcoming improved external performance for Parquet data and Snowflake’s cross-cloud replication capabilities and he offers his opinion on a future with cross-cloud warehousing.

Both hosts also discuss the implications of new features being deployed first on AWS and later on GCP or Azure, data lake capabilities, governance and security updates and much more. Tune in to learn more.

Key Points From this Episode

• Introducing today’s topic: Summary of the Snowday PR event.
• Welcoming today’s guests: Warner Chaves and Sandeep Arora.
• Warner fills us in on Snowflake’s latest improvements.
• Hear about compression and impact on Time Travel cost.
• AWS as Snowflake’s testing ground for new product/feature rollouts.
• Sandeep touches on the better external performance for Parquet data.
• Hear about cloud storage for data lake and direct file querying.
• Sandeep walks us through Snowflake’s cross-cloud replication capabilities.
• Hear Sandeep’s wish for future Snowflake features.
• Hear about the replication GUI and Snowgrid.
• Hear about direct schema sharing and client redirection.
• Warner explains how serverless tasks can help reduce long-term costs.
• Hear about security and governance updates.
• Sandeep delves into the data masking feature.
• Touch on the new logging framework and access history view feature.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode

• Warner Chaves on LinkedIn
• Warner Chaves on Twitter
• Snowflake
• Azure
• Databricks
• BigQuery
• Synapse Analytics
• Redshift