The software division for Capital One Financial Corp. has released enhancements for a tool designed to track cost, performance and usage for Snowflake accounts.

The product, Slingshot, is a set of templates, custom workflows and controls that Capital One developed originally for internal use. The financial services giant decided to bring Slingshot to market last year and provide cost optimization support to the Snowflake community as cloud usage continued to expand.

“The key challenge here is that the cloud is a story of more, more power, more flexibility, more speed of adoption, more data into the hands of more people to create more and better business insights,” said Patrick Barch (pictured), senior director of product management of Capital One Software at Capital One Financial Corp. “But if you lean too heavily into that story of more, you open yourself up to risk on two fronts, data security risk and cost overruns. We think about this as optimizing price performance and striking that perfect balance between enablement and governance.”

Barch spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at Snowflake Summit during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Slingshot’s enhancements and Snowflake’s latest news. (* Disclosure below.)

Intelligent query tool

Capital One’s software product continually scans the Snowflake environment to flag occurrences of over or under-provisioning. A new enhancement for Slingshot scans query text and runs it against a set of optimization best practices.

“One of the challenges of the cloud is that for the first time, bad queries cost money because they don’t let your warehouse sleep,” Barch said. “We’ve launched an intelligent query advisor tool that analyzes your queries and optimizes them and helps your analysts be more efficient with how they are using SQL.”

On the opening day of its Summit gathering, Snowflake made a series of announcements to support the programming environments that customers use. Two of the releases will help drive greater transparency, according to Barch.

“The two things that I’m most excited about that they announced this morning were the budgets capability and their utilization metric,” Barch said. “It’s going to make it easier for us as a third-party tool to understand what’s going on under the hood of our customer’s Snowflake account and help our customers more easily manage their spend.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit:

(* Disclosure: Snowflake Inc. and Capital One Financial Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Snowflake, Capital One, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE