Snowflake Unveils Apache Iceberg™ Innovations, Giving Enterprises the Best of Open Data and AI-Ready Performance

Rhea-AI Summary

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) has announced enhanced support for Apache Iceberg™ tables, combining open format flexibility with enterprise-grade performance. The innovation allows organizations to manage their data in an open, interoperable format while leveraging Snowflake's platform capabilities.

Key features include:

• Lakehouse Analytics with the same compute engine as Snowflake's native format
• Search Optimization Service and Query Acceleration Service for Iceberg tables
• Comprehensive security and governance with built-in business continuity
• Secure data sharing technology extended to Iceberg tables

Notable customers implementing these innovations include Illumina, Komodo Health, Medidata, and WHOOP. Snowflake's commitment to open source is evidenced by 35% of its acquisitions over the last four years being companies that strengthen open data ecosystems.

Positive

• Strategic expansion into open-source market while maintaining proprietary advantages
• Integration of multiple high-profile enterprise customers (Illumina, Komodo Health, Medidata, WHOOP)
• Enhanced product offering combining open format flexibility with enterprise-grade performance
• Strong commitment to open-source development demonstrated through strategic acquisitions

Negative

• Potential revenue impact from offering open-source alternatives to proprietary solutions
• Increased competition in the open-source data management space
• Some key features still in preview or pending general availability

Insights

Data Infrastructure Analyst

Snowflake's announcement of full Apache Iceberg support represents a significant strategic enhancement to their data platform. This integration directly addresses the industry's long-standing dilemma between proprietary performance and open interoperability - effectively allowing customers to have both.

The technical implementation brings three critical capabilities to Iceberg tables: Snowflake's compute engine performance, comprehensive security/governance, and their proven data sharing technology. This creates a compelling proposition for enterprises with complex data environments who previously faced challenging tradeoffs.

What's particularly notable is how this positions Snowflake within the broader data ecosystem. Their statement that 35% of acquisitions over four years strengthened open data capabilities demonstrates a coherent long-term strategy rather than merely responding to market pressure. The integration of acquired technologies like Datavolo, Modin, Streamlit and TruEra reveals a methodical approach to building an open but integrated ecosystem.

Customer testimonials from Illumina, Komodo Health, Medidata, and WHOOP validate the real-world value proposition across industries with complex data requirements. These implementations highlight how Iceberg tables solve specific pain points around accessibility, governance, and analytics at scale.

This move strengthens Snowflake's competitive positioning by embracing open formats while preserving their performance advantages - an approach that should resonate especially well with enterprises balancing innovation with governance requirements.

Enterprise AI Strategist

Snowflake's Iceberg integration creates a powerful catalyst for enterprise AI initiatives by solving a fundamental data foundation challenge. For AI systems to deliver meaningful results, they require both comprehensive data access and high-performance processing - capabilities that traditionally forced compromises.

The technical significance lies in how Snowflake extends their compute capabilities to open table formats. Their Search Optimization Service and Query Acceleration Service on Iceberg tables creates a performance profile comparable to native formats while preserving interoperability. This directly accelerates the data preparation phase that typically consumes 70-80% of AI project timelines.

What makes this particularly valuable is how it addresses the governance/accessibility paradox in AI development. Data scientists need flexible, open-format access, while governance teams require consistent security controls. Snowflake has effectively bridged this gap with unified security that works across both native and open formats.

The disaster recovery capabilities for Iceberg tables also addresses a critical enterprise requirement - ensuring AI systems remain resilient against disruptions while maintaining an open architecture. This combination of performance, governance, and reliability removes significant barriers to enterprise AI adoption.

For organizations building AI solutions, this integration creates a foundation where data can be both widely accessible for model development and tightly governed for production deployment - a balance that typically requires complex architectural compromises.

• 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

No-Headquarters/BOZEMAN, Mont.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- 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.

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 Iceberg^TM: 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 Polaris^TM (Incubating): Designed to overcome vendor lock-in challenges, Apache Polaris^TM (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.

© 2025 Snowflake Inc. All rights reserved. Snowflake, the Snowflake logo, and all other Snowflake product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Snowflake Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names or logos mentioned or used herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). Snowflake may not be associated with, or be sponsored or endorsed by, any such holder(s).

About Snowflake

Snowflake makes enterprise AI easy, efficient and trusted. More than 11,000 companies around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to share data, build applications, and power their business with AI. The era of enterprise AI is here. Learn more at snowflake.com (NYSE: SNOW).

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250408288168/en/

Media Contacts:

Sandya Kola

Product PR Specialist, Snowflake

press@snowflake.com

Source: Snowflake Inc.

FAQ

What are the key benefits of Snowflake's new Apache Iceberg tables integration for SNOW investors?

The integration combines open format flexibility with enterprise-grade performance, enabling customers to use open data formats while maintaining Snowflake's security and performance capabilities, potentially expanding market reach.

How many major customers are currently using Snowflake's Apache Iceberg innovations?

Several major enterprises including Illumina, Komodo Health, Medidata, and WHOOP are actively using Snowflake's Apache Iceberg innovations.

What percentage of Snowflake's recent acquisitions focus on open source technologies?

35% of Snowflake's acquisitions over the last four years have been companies with technologies that strengthen open data ecosystems.

What new features does SNOW offer for Apache Iceberg tables in 2025?

New features include Lakehouse Analytics, Search Optimization Service, Query Acceleration Service, comprehensive security, disaster recovery, and secure data sharing capabilities.