In February, Snowflake continued enhancing the Snowflake platform with enhancements across the Data Cloud aimed at helping customers access, manage, share, and benefit from the world’s ever-expanding wealth of data. Here’s a brief rundown of some of the key announcements from February 2021.

SNOWFLAKE DATA MARKETPLACE

Snowflake Data Marketplace gives data scientists, business intelligence and analytics professionals, and everyone else who desires data-driven decision-making access to live, ready-to-query data sets from more than 125 external data providers and data service providers as of January 29, 2021. Snowflake Data Marketplace offers a wide range of open and commercial data sets across 16 categories including public health, weather, location, demographics, and software-as-a-service providers. In February, Snowflake made it easier for marketplace providers to update their profiles and added several new providers, among them Foursquare, SEC Reporting Analytics, Sulpetro, Acxiom, CSRHub, and Lifesight.

For Data Providers: Easily Update Your Snowflake Data Marketplace Profile

Snowflake Data Marketplace providers can now update their profiles without the need to republish existing listings or create a new profile. When a provider updates its profile, it simply submits the changes for Snowflake approval; once a new version of a profile is approved, it is automatically updated for all of the organization’s existing published listings in Snowflake Data Marketplace.

For Data Consumers: New Data Providers Broaden Industry Sets

Snowflake Data Marketplace continues to expand the breadth and depth of data sets available to Snowflake customers. New partnerships in February included the following industry leaders from location; financial services; consumer insights; environmental, social, and governance (ESG); and oil and gas data categories:

Foursquare: The leading independent location technology company, Foursquare provides a data set of more than 95 million commercial venues around the world, using data from more than 14 billion explicit check-ins from its consumer apps. Information from its Global Places data set can help businesses make smarter decisions, developers create more engaging experiences, and brands build more effective marketing strategies. Learn more.

SEC Reporting Analytics: The information and analytics from this service help organizations make informed investment decisions by streamlining research, assessment, and comparison of fundamental financial-statement operating metrics and accounting disclosures for all SEC EDGAR filing forms (Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, and Form 8-K). The platform was developed to support mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds, private equity, growth equity, venture capital, institutional, and retail investor communities in developing programs and trading strategies that meet investment and target returns. Learn more.

Sulpetro: A data firm specializing in natural gas liquid (NGL) market intelligence and data analytics, Sulpetro has served the natural gas sector since 1983 and produces what it claims is the most comprehensive NGL data set available in the oil and gas marketplace. Its data sets provide market insights to assist organizations in making well-informed investment decisions that deliver the highest business value. Learn more.

Acxiom: Acxiom provides the most comprehensive global suite of consumer insights in the market, harnessing data about real people across the most sources of data to power precise audience targeting and people-based marketing. Acxiom leverages data to help brands succeed by understanding more about known or anonymous audiences, completing touchpoint contact data. Learn more.

CSRHub: CSRHub offers a comprehensive global set of consensus ESG ratings and information. Founded in 2007, CSRHub’s big data system measures the ESG impact that drives corporate and investor ESG decisions.  Learn more.

Lifesight: A leading customer intelligence company that helps brands and enterprises leverage identity resolution and data enrichment to empower their data strategies, Lifesight offers an industry-leading solution that enables brands and enterprises to transform their customer data into actionable insights that help drive business decisions, optimize marketing spend, and improve customer experiences.  Learn more.

GOVERNANCE

Easily Protect Sensitive Information with Dynamic Data Masking

Snowflake’s platform delivers leading data governance and security, with fine-grained controls to provide consistent policies and protections that don’t hinder innovation. In February, Snowflake continued to enhance its capabilities with the announcement of general availability for column-level security. This enables users to protect sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) by applying masking policies to columns in a table or view. Included in this release are the Dynamic Data Masking feature, in which plain-text sensitive data is dynamically masked at query time for unauthorized users, and the External Tokenization feature, which makes it possible to tokenize sensitive data before loading it into Snowflake and dynamically detokenize it for authorized users at query time.

EXTENSIBILITY 

External Functions Feature Brings Extensibility to Data Pipelines

Modern analytical workloads often call for complex transformations or augmentations that require using custom code or third-party services. Using external services and libraries, however, often complicates data pipelines. To simplify using remote services, Snowflake created an External Functions feature that enables users to invoke external APIs and custom code from within Snowflake and blend the results into their query results. Customers can use external functions in geocoding, machine learning scoring, external tokenization, and a variety of additional use cases. In February, Snowflake announced general availability of External Functions for AWS API Gateway and Microsoft Azure API Management. Check out the blog to learn more.

EXPANSION

Snowflake Adds New AWS Region in Europe

Snowflake’s platform uniquely spans multiple clouds and regions, not only giving customers choice in where they run their workloads but also providing new levels of availability and connectivity to data. Snowflake continues to expand to new regions so data can be stored and processed where customers need. With February’s announcement of expanded availability to the Europe (London) region on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Snowflake now offers seven geographical locations in Europe across all three supported cloud platforms—AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. 

MANAGEABILITY

Access to Billing and Usage Details Now in Public Preview in the Snowflake Organizations Feature

Now in public preview, the Snowflake Organizations feature provides a central view of all accounts in your business, including billing and usage details. To simplify account management and billing, database replication and failover/failback, Snowflake Secure Data Sharing, and other account administration tasks, organizations give you instant access to information about your account’s contract, hourly credit use of warehouses within the last year, rate information, daily consumption, and remaining balance—providing you with a real-time view into your current usage and spend. 

UNTIL NEXT MONTH

These are just a few of the new features and updates available in Snowflake. For the full list, see the Release Notes. And as always, watch for additional updates as Snowflake continuously adds new features and functions that help customers in every industry go further and faster with their data.