Snowflake Unveils Enterprise Data Warehouse Sharing
Snowflake Computing has announced an interesting new technical capability to its cloud data warehouse, enabling direct sharing of live data between enterprises. Snowflake is calling the new innovation the “Data Sharehouse.” The technology allows an organization to share any part of its data warehouse in a governed and secure way with any other business in real-time. The main selling point of the offering is that it bypasses existing methods of sharing that allow only “primitive mechanisms” for data publishing, access and control.
Snowflake’s data sharing enables users to create one-on-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships to share data. In their product news release, Snowflake outlines four main use cases for their new data warehouse. With the Data Sharehouse, users can transport and accept structured and semi-structured data to and from other enterprises.
This innovation requires no copying or movement of data and works off of only simple commands. There’s no additional cost for the technology to existing users and the business agreement for sharing data are direct between providers and consumers with no involvement from Snowflake. Data providers do not incur a cost for sharing data and data consumers only pay for the compute resources they use on the data shared with them.
Investment in a sharing-centric data environment has the ability to save enterprises some serious coin, as the costs for storing another enterprise’s data are eliminated.
In a statement, Snowflake’s CEO Bob Muglia explained: “Snowflake Data Sharing transforms data into a product, a true business asset. Our established and recent customers have been using Snowflake Data Sharing in ingenious ways to redefine their data analytics and their business operations to bolster their competitive advantage. Best of all, the business models that data sharing companies create with one another are their own, without any involvement from Snowflake.”