Snowflake has rolled out a new workload for its Data Cloud platform, called Unistore, that it claims will herald the ‘future of application development’.
Announced at the company’s Snowflake Summit 2022 event in Las Vegas, the Unistore workload is designed to unlock new app development opportunities through the blending together of transactional and analytical data types.
Unistore will join the portfolio alongside Snowflake’s data warehousing and data lake offerings, expanding the platform to cover off transactional use cases like application state and data serving.
Tearing down silos
Historically, transactional data (pertaining to day-to-day business operations) and analytical data (used to fuel strategy and decision making) have been housed in separate systems, creating something of a development bottleneck.
However, the ability to run transactional and analytical queries simultaneously from within the same database (referred to as hybrid transactional-analytical processing, or HTAP) with services like Unistore will help address these challenges, allowing organizations to react to emerging business opportunities in real-time.
As summarized by analyst firm Gartner, the benefits of such a system are multi-fold, eliminating the need to move data between operational databases and data warehouses, ensuring transactional data is readily available for analytics as soon as it is created, and reducing the need for multiple copies of the same data.
Alongside the launch of the Unistore workload, Snowflake also announced a private preview of Hybrid Tables, a new table type designed to help customers spin up quick analyses of transactional data.
One company given early access to the new table type is Adobe, which has been playing with Hybrid Tables in support of Adobe Campaign, its cross-channel marketing service.
“Running Adobe Campaign on Snowflake has enabled us to offer unparalleled speed and scale to our customers, who can now leverage our best-in-class cross-channel campaign management functionality with performance that can’t be matched,” said Nick Hall, who heads up Adobe Campaign.
The creative software firm claims the new Unistore workload facilitated a 50x improvement in delivery preparation time in initial testing, with the potential for additional gains in future.
“Unistore is the foundation for another wave of innovation in the Snowflake Data Cloud,” added Christian Kleinerman, SVP Product at Snowflake. “Similar to how we redefined data lakes and data warehouses for our customers, Unistore is ushering in a renaissance of building and deploying a new generation of applications in the Data Cloud.”
Disclaimer: Our flights and accommodation for Snowflake Summit 2022 were funded by Snowflake, but the organization had no editorial control over the content of this article.
