Key Takeaways from Snowflake Summit – Speed, Data Movement and Applications in the Cloud

This is one of the faster growing industry events I can remember, with a reported 10,000 attendees vs the last in person event at 2,000 in 2019. The ecosystem has also grown significantly, with approximately 200 exhibitors this year.Given the record setting revenue growth of Snowflake it shouldn’t be surprising, but it really hit you as you walked the packed expo.

Qlik had a big showing this year with many joint customers presenting success stories, which is always my and I think most attendees’ favorite part of an event.Our presentation on “Real-time Data Integration, Transformation and Warehouse Automation” was standing room only and we received a lot of great feedback post session. Personally, it was nice to dust off the live presentation cobwebs and see live reactions from an audience. Data warehouse automation is still a new concept for many, and I recommend this report from Gartner to learn more on how customers are leveraging a model-driven and no-code way to success.

My personal take on the most interesting Snowflake product announcements from the show:

• Native Application Framework – this is a bold strategy to encourage third parties to build apps to run inside Snowflake and monetize with Snowflake Marketplace. Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman made the bold prediction that this will “disrupt application development” which made several ISVs take notice.
• Unistore – extending from analytics to also support OLTP, this is designed to enable storage of transactional data (writing and reading data) and encouraging new app development.
• Performance improvements across the board including 10% faster compute on AWS, 10% faster performance for write-heavy workloads, 5 times faster performance on searches on geospatial data and more.
• Snowpark – expanding workload types to include Python-native apps that run in the core engine and benefit from all of the underlying Snowflake infrastructure, which supports the theme of moving the application to the data.
• Apache Iceberg support – this provides an open framework for leaving data in parquet format and in a cloud object store like S3 while still querying the data from Snowflake, utilizing the same native query optimization as if the data were stored in Snowflake.

Qlik also had product announcements including new Qlik Cloud Data Service capabilities for real-time data integration and new Direct Query pushdown for analytics. We also had a great time participating in theCube and Man on the Street video segments.

Overall, it was great event, and special shout out to Marriot for the room upgrade at the Cosmopolitan and a strong recommendation to try the paella at Jaleo while you’re there!

For more information about how Qlik works with Snowflake, read our new best practices guide or visit here.