Snowflake Unveils Apache Iceberg™ Innovations, Giving Enterprises the Best of Open Data and AI-Ready Performance
- Customers now get the best of both worlds: Iceberg's flexibility and interoperability coupled with Snowflake's powerful platform to make their data easy, connected, and trusted
- Thousands of customers including Illumina, Komodo Health, Medidata, and WHOOP can now easily activate open-format data with best-in-class performance
Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW), the AI Data Cloud company, announced that it is bringing its core capabilities — unparalleled performance, secure data sharing, and data protection — to Apache Iceberg™ tables1, one of the fastest-growing open table formats, empowering organizations to activate data faster with zero data movement and open interoperability. As a result, Snowflake customers can now seamlessly accelerate their open lakehouse strategies, unlocking data access and analysis across open and managed environments in order to build, scale, and share advanced insights and AI-powered apps faster.
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Snowflake Unveils Apache Iceberg™ Innovations, Giving Enterprises the Best of Open Data and AI-Ready Performance
Until now, organizations have been forced to make tradeoffs when it comes to managing their data — relying on integrated data platforms or opting for open, interoperable data formats like parquet. With Snowflake's full support for Apache Iceberg tables, customers now gain the best of both worlds. Users can store, manage, and analyze their data in an open, interoperable format, while still benefiting from Snowflake's easy, connected, and trusted platform. All of this happens without vendor lock-in, enabling thousands of global customers with unparalleled performance and flexibility so they can tap into all of their data, and ultimately propel their AI strategies forward.
"The future of data is open, but it also needs to be easy," said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake. "Customers shouldn't have to choose between open formats and best-in-class performance or business continuity. With Snowflake's latest Iceberg tables innovations, customers can work with their open data exactly as they would with data stored in the Snowflake platform, all while removing complexity and preserving Snowflake's enterprise-grade performance and security."
Snowflake's enhanced Iceberg tables support can be used to accelerate:
- Lakehouse Analytics: Customers can now experience the same compute engine of Snowflake's native table format on Iceberg tables, and apply Search Optimization Service (general availability soon) or Query Acceleration Service (general availability soon) on Iceberg tables for enhanced query performance. With Snowflake's managed Iceberg tables, customers gain the flexibility of open storage formats while preserving the industry-leading price-performance of Snowflake's AI Data Cloud. Snowflake is actively collaborating with the Apache Iceberg community to launch support for VARIANT data types.
- Comprehensive Security and Governance, with Built-In Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: Snowflake brings seamless security to Iceberg tables, providing powerful, intuitive controls to keep open lakehouse environments secure and easy to manage, while enabling customer compliance. Customers get the best of both worlds — open data flexibility with built-in security. Snowflake is also extending its reliable data replication and syncing to Iceberg tables (in private preview), ensuring that in the case of a system failure, cyberattack, or other disasters, companies can quickly restore their data without major disruptions, all while supporting open lakehouse architectures.
- Data Sharing: By bringing Snowflake's secure data sharing technology to Iceberg tables, customers can access, share, distribute, and monetize their data seamlessly, just as they do with native Snowflake table formats.
Driving the Future of Open Source and Data Innovation
Snowflake is deeply invested in advocating for open standards and community-driven open source projects that enhance data interoperability and transparency. In fact, 35% of Snowflake's acquisitions over the last four years have been companies with technologies that strengthen open data ecosystems, underscoring the company's investment in openness.
Notable open source projects that Snowflake contributes to include:
- Apache IcebergTM: Snowflake's contributions to Iceberg enable efficient, governed data lake management with schema evolution, partitioning, and transaction management.
- Apache NiFi: Built on NiFi, Datavolo (acquired by Snowflake in 2024) simplifies ingestion, transformation, and real-time pipeline management.
- Apache PolarisTM (Incubating): Designed to overcome vendor lock-in challenges, Apache PolarisTM (Incubating) ensures enterprise security and Iceberg interoperability across major cloud providers.
- Modin: Snowflake accelerates pandas workloads with Modin (acquired by Snowflake in 2023), enabling seamless scaling without code change.
- Streamlit: Snowflake's integration with Streamlit (acquired by Snowflake in 2022) allows users to build and share interactive web applications, data dashboards, and visualizations with ease.
- TruEra: TruEra (acquired by Snowflake in 2024) boosts AI explainability and model performance monitoring for bias detection, compliance, and performance insights.
Supporting Snowflake Customer Quotes on the Power of Iceberg:
- Illumina: "By running analytics on Apache Iceberg tables with Snowflake, we've unlocked flexibility and performance in managing our manufacturing system data at scale2. This open architecture allows us to seamlessly analyze vast datasets while maintaining cost efficiency, delivering faster insights to improve manufacturing processes and faster access to critical data for self-service. Snowflake's support for Iceberg has not only improved our data agility but also reinforced the industry-wide push toward open standards, ensuring that innovation in genomics remains accessible, scalable, and impactful for the entire scientific community." — Stephen Horn, Staff Data Solutions Architect, Illumina
- Komodo Health: "At Komodo Health, our mission is to reduce the global burden of disease through our comprehensive Healthcare Map®, platform, tooling, and analytics solutions. Apache Iceberg and open source catalogs like Polaris Catalog have been transformative in helping us create actionable and governed insights from complex healthcare data. Open table formats provide the flexibility, interoperability, and enhanced data governance we need, while Snowflake's unparalleled performance capabilities ensure we can scale these insights effectively with maximum efficiency. Together, this powerful technology foundation empowers us to make healthcare data more accessible and actionable, ultimately improving patient outcomes across the healthcare ecosystem." — Laurent Bride, Chief Technology Officer, Komodo Health
- Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes brand: "Innovations like Apache Iceberg are critical for Medidata and drive usability for our products like Clinical Data Studio to help our customers achieve faster, more flexible, and simpler data operations. A unified data layer is the foundation for our AI powered platform. Open, interoperable data standards, particularly through Snowflake's robust open catalog, Iceberg tables, and data collaboration technologies, will further advance our data strategy and propel our industry." — Tom Doyle, Chief Technology Officer, Medidata.
- WHOOP: "Data interoperability and flexibility are essential to delivering accurate, real-time insights to our customers. The vendor-neutral design of Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris Catalog ensures we can seamlessly activate diverse data sources without having to copy it or get locked into a single ecosystem." — Matt Luizzi, Senior Director of Business Analytics, WHOOP
Learn More:
- Get started with Apache Iceberg tables and Snowflake using this quickstart.
- See how thousands of global organizations are powering their open data lakehouses with Snowflake through these resources.
- Stay on top of the latest news and announcements from Snowflake on LinkedIn and X.
1 "Apache" is a registered trademark or trademark of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries.
2 For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains express and implied forward-looking statements, including statements regarding (i) Snowflake's business strategy, (ii) Snowflake's products, services, and technology offerings, including those that are under development or not generally available, (iii) market growth, trends, and competitive considerations, and (iv) the integration, interoperability, and availability of Snowflake's products with and on third-party platforms. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those described under the heading "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in the Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and the Annual Reports on Form 10-K that Snowflake files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. As a result, you should not rely on any forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.
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