Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse power house, has opened a Private Data Exchange for listing Snowflake data sets and secure sharing within a business and its ecosystem.
CEO Frank Slootman said in an announcement yesterday: “The Snowflake Private Data Exchange represents the future of managing and sharing data broadly and securely inside enterprise and institutional boundaries. The data exchange model will become the deployment standard for exploring, discovering and sharing data enterprise-wide.”
Currently, a business unit has to set up a special arrangement to share data warehouse data sets with other departments or affiliates in a supply chain. This can be cumbersome and time-consuming, perhaps involving APIs, FTP transfers or Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) procedures to move data copies from the warehouse to the other parties.
Snowflake’s Private Data Exchange (PDX) acts as a central hub in which data sets can be listed and specific third-parties given access. Once validated they go straight to the data.
Snowflake said a PDX can be used share data sets with authorised third parties in a business eco-system, for bi-directional data exchanges, or even to sell data set access for a fee to customers. We could think of manufacturing chain or financial institution partnerships using it to share sensitive data.
Snowflake made the announcement shortly before AWS unleashed marketing war today with its latest Redshift data warehouse acceleration developments.
