Cloud data warehouse darling Snowflake Inc. today is expanding its Data Cloud with new platform features focused on data programmability and governance.

The aim is to help customers bring even more information into their Snowflake Data Clouds as a means of obtaining more valuable business insights.

At the same time, the company is expanding its Data Marketplace with more offerings from third-party data providers and the addition of “Try-before-you-buy” and usage-based purchase options for those products. Snowflake has also created a new partner network program, Powered by Snowflake, to assist companies in building more capable applications that tap into its Data Cloud platform.

Snowflake’s Data Cloud is basically a data warehouse service that runs on any public cloud platform, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The service is an alternative to traditional on-premises data warehouses, which are a combination of hardware and software that unify data from multiple sources and execute queries on it.

Customers pay for Snowflake according to how much they use it, as opposed to a flat subscription fee. Snowflake Data Cloud is extremely popular and has helped Snowflake emerge as one of the leading data platform companies in the enterprise.

The data programmability updates announced today at the company’s Snowflake Summit virtual event include the coming availability of Snowpark, which is the company’s developer environment. Snowpark is used to write code in any programming language and use that to execute workloads such as extract, transform and load or ETL, data preparation and feature engineering on the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Snowpark is currently in private preview, but will be moving to public preview soon, meaning all of the company’s customers will get a chance to play with it. Moreover, they’ll get more assistance with it, as Snowflake also announced a new Snowpark Accelerated Program that provides access to its technical experts.

Also coming soon in public preview soon are Snowflake’s new Java User-Defined Functions, which enable customers can bring their own code and business logic to Snowflake, and new Unstructured Data capabilities. Users will be able to store, govern, process and share their unstructured data alongside both structured and semistructured information.

There is one new capability that customers don’t need to wait for. In public preview today, the Snowflake SQL API makes it possible for custom-built and third-party applications to call Snowflake’s Data Cloud through a REST application programming interface without the need for client-side drivers. It’s all about reducing complexity and administration overheads, the company explained.

On the integration side, Snowflake said customers can now use its service as a source for Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, which prepares data for use in machine learning.

Data governance is another big focus for Snowflake, and on that front the company announced a new classification function in preview that automatically detects personally identifiable information in tables. It then uses a tagging framework to annotate that data, so companies can use role-based policies to control who can access it. The anonymized views feature, meanwhile, helps protect privacy and identity within datasets while still enabling them to be used. It will launch in private preview soon.

Snowflake unveiled a bevy of platform optimizations too, delivering “improved storage economics” as a result of improvements to the way it compresses dataenhanced support for interactive experiences, and a new dashboard that helps customers better understand how they’re using Snowflake and what their associated costs are.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Muller told SiliconANGLE it is good to see Snowflake investing into its platform because progress is key in an era where infinite insights are in big demand by every kind of enterprise.

“It’s good to see the support of Java and more scale for building better insight apps,” Mueller said. “The new integrations with third party apps via RESTful APIs and the added capabilities for unstructured data are also key additions to Snowflake’s plaform.”

Expanded Data Marketplace

Snowflake also took the occasion to announce the Snowflake Data Marketplace is now generally available, and with that comes a number of updates that it said will help customers do more with their data.

The Snowflake Data Marketplace is a place for companies to buy and query available data sets and services from third-parties. Data providers can publish data sets or make data analytics services available to Snowflake customers. The data sets are accessed directly from customer’s Snowflake accounts and are updated in real time.

New features that are currently under development and expected to be made available in a future release include the ability to “try before you buy.” Through this, customers will be able to access and evaluate sample data to see if it meets their needs and joins properly with other datasets they analyze. They can then purchase the full dataset if they desire. The company is also planning to add new usage-based purchase options.

“It’s good to see progress being made on Snowflake’ Data Marketplace as well,” Mueller said. “More than enough has already been said about the critical importance of data for enterprise success, so anything that allows enterprise to accelerate their data operations will be much welcomed.”

Snowflake shared that the marketplace has been growing quickly, with the number of available listings rising by 76% in the last six months alone. New listings include data sets from providers such as ZoomInfo Technologies LLC and Foursquare Inc., for example.

“With Snowflake’s Data Cloud, enterprises can access the ZoomInfo data they need, when they need it, and pair it with their own data assets, to unlock new insights and solve their most complex business problems,” said ZoomInfo founder and Chief Executive Henry Schuck.

Powered by Snowflake

The new partner network program is designed to support other companies that want to create applications that leverage the Snowflake Data Cloud.

The company explained that through the program, it will provide access to a range of design resources that can help make it easier to build applications. Those resources include access to Snowflake’s technical experts, workshops and also assistance in building the right data architecture for their specific application. Snowflake will provide various reference architecture designs and step-by-step guides, it said.

Other benefits will include co-marketing campaigns with Snowflake that might entail joint solution content, webinars and events, the company said.

Snowflake Senior Vice President of Product Christian Kleinerman said hundreds of companies have already built applications and, in some cases, their entire business atop of Snowflake. “Based on their feedback, we developed the Powered by Snowflake program to make it even easier for software innovators to bring groundbreaking applications to market that redefine industry standards and supercharge business growth,” he said.

A number of companies have already benefited from Powered by Snowflake, among them Adobe Inc., which received assistance from the company as it tailored its Adobe Experience Cloud applications to work with Snowflake Data Cloud.

“Adobe partnered with Snowflake to build applications driving interactive, audience-centric campaigns with operational efficiency and elastic scale,” said Adobe Vice President of Product Sundeep Parsa.

Companies that want to work with Snowflake can apply to join the Powered by Snowflake program today.

Image: Snowflake