By Anirban Ghoshal
Snowflake has announced new capabilities for its Horizon suite, a built-in set of composite standards and compliance features.
Horizon, showcased in November last year, came with features such as data quality monitoring, data lineage UI, differential privacy policies, enhanced data classification, and other additional authorizations and certifications.
The new updates to the suite, which were announced at the ongoing annual Snowflake Summit, include a new Internal Marketplace, a feature that describes objects with the help of AI via Snowflake Copilot, and the general availability of Universal Search.
The Internal Marketplace — currently in private preview — allows enterprise users to curate and publish data products such as data, models, and applications specifically for internal teams while preventing unintended sharing to external parties, the company said.
To help enterprises with discovery, Snowflake said that it is making its Universal Search feature generally available.
Universal Search — showcased in November last year — allows users to search across databases, Iceberg tables, data inside Snowflake, Native Applications, and the Snowflake Marketplace using Neeva’s technology. Snowflake acquired Neeva in May last year.
Aiding discovery and curation
In addition, the cloud data warehouse company said that it is baking in another feature to aid discovery and curation.
This feature, dubbed AI-Powered Object Descriptions, will use Snowflake Copilot to automatically generate relevant context and comments for tables and views.
AI-Powered Object Descriptions is expected to enter private preview soon.
Further, the company said it is working on making available a new capability, which would allow enterprise users to share AI models alongside Iceberg and Dynamic Tables.
Expanding the AI Data Cloud
Snowflake also announced that it would be expanding the AI Data Cloud footprint to regulated sovereign markets.
“This includes an EU-only data boundary that keeps all customer data, alongside relevant service and usage data, within regional borders to provide European customers with stronger data residency and data sovereignty assurances to meet regional regulatory requirements,” the company said in a statement.
Snowflake already servers over 40 cloud regions.
The company said it will also offer a separate environment to the Department of Defense (DoD) customers.
