Microsoft Expands Partnership with Snowflake to Enable Bi-Directional Data Access and Save Costs

Microsoft is making strides in simplifying data efforts for enterprises. During its Build 2024 conference, the company announced an expanded partnership with Snowflake that will enable bi-directional data access for joint customers. This move will support interoperability between Microsoft Fabric, the company’s end-to-end data analytics platform, and Snowflake’s data cloud. By eliminating the need for multiple copies of data at different locations, this partnership will not only streamline data management but also generate significant cost savings in the long run.

Last year, Microsoft introduced Fabric, a unified platform that handles an organization’s data and analytics workloads from start to finish. Fabric gained attention in the industry for its use of open formats, such as Apache Parquet and Delta Lake, to bring together data from various sources. This decision to support open formats reflects Microsoft’s commitment to providing customers with complete control over their data. According to Arun Ulagaratchagan, corporate vice president of Azure Data at Microsoft, the company aims to make it easier for customers to benefit from their innovations by adopting open standards and collaborating with industry-leading partners.

As the next step in this work, Microsoft is expanding its engagement with Snowflake by adding support for another open format: Apache Iceberg. Snowflake will serve as a native data store for OneLake, Microsoft Fabric’s data lake, enabling joint customers to store and access their data as a single copy in the Iceberg format. Likewise, Snowflake users will be able to access Iceberg data in OneLake. Previously, users had to build pipelines and maintain copies of data on each platform, which was time-consuming and resource-intensive.

With bi-directional storage and access, users can integrate their Snowflake data with Microsoft Fabric’s ecosystem of applications, including Teams, Excel, Power BI, and Azure AI Studio. Similarly, data stored in OneLake can be extended to Snowflake for cross-cloud AI, sharing and collaboration, and advanced analytics. This flexibility allows customers to mix and match technologies and engines based on their specific use cases, providing them with complete control over their data.

The interoperability experience between Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric is currently in development and is expected to launch in preview later this year. According to Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake, there is already significant interest from enterprise customers who are eager to take advantage of this integration. Microsoft Build will continue until May 23, 2024, during which attendees can learn more about the future of data management and analytics.