Snowflake To Acquire Ponder, Boosting Python Capabilities In the Data Cloud

Python’s popularity has more than doubled in the past decade¹ and it is quickly becoming the preferred language for development across machine learning, application development, pipelines and more. One of our goals at Snowflake is to ensure we continue to deliver a best-in-class platform for Python developers. 

Snowflake customers are already harnessing the power of Python through Snowpark, a set of runtimes and libraries that securely deploy and process non-SQL code directly in Snowflake. Every day, we witness approximately 20 million Snowpark queries² driving a spectrum of data engineering and data science tasks, with Python leading the way. Furthermore, the integration of Streamlit in Snowflake empowers swift development of interactive applications entirely in Python, complemented by features like Python Worksheets. This flexibility in language and programming constructs not only optimizes data architecture but also turbocharges development cycles, fortifies governance, enhances security and more.

To further enable Python data practitioners, Snowflake has announced its intent to acquire Ponder, a pioneer in bridging the gap between popular data science libraries and where data lives. Additionally, Ponder maintains Modin, a widely-used open-source library for scalable Pandas operations. We’re beyond excited to be joining forces not just with the founders of Ponder and their incredible team, but also with the entire Modin community. Modin boasts hundreds of thousands of users and a dedicated community of over a hundred contributors. This community has played a pivotal role in shaping Modin's current success and will remain instrumental in its future development. We are steadfast in our commitment to support and nurture both the open-source project and its vibrant community.

  ¹ From 2013- 2023, based on survey results from Stack Overflow.  ² From October 2023 based on internal data.