Informatica boosts data integration features for Snowflake data warehouse

Informatica boosts data integration features for Snowflake data warehouse

Informatica Corp. is expanding its line of data integration and governance tools for the Snowflake Computing Inc. data warehouse with today’s launch of serverless data integration pipelines, a portal for creating customer profiles and a collaborative marketplace of data analytics tools.

Informatica, which is the largest pure-play data integration provider, has been steadily migrating its business to the cloud via partnerships with all the major cloud data warehousing services. Its metadata-driven approach uses machine learning to infer schemas, which are the organizational blueprint of database management systems, from both structured and unstructured sources.

The company’s Enterprise Data Catalog “spans everything from Cobol to the ‘internet of things,’” said Chief Product Officer Jitesh Ghai (pictured).  “We will infer metadata where it doesn’t exist and extract it where it does. We’ll recommend other data sets that are interesting, kick off a workflow and, if approved, auto-provision within an [Amazon Web Services Inc.] S3 bucket.”

Customers can use Informatica’s catalog to inventory existing data assets and identify trusted data to import into Snowflake, track data as it’s migrated, clean and normalize the data, and protect data assets in accordance with company policies and external regulations.

The new services for the popular Snowflake platform are intended to solve two problems, Ghai said: customers augmenting on-premises workloads with a cloud data warehouse and those modernizing their on-premises warehouses to Snowflake. “We are optimized to work with data warehouse appliances on-prem and equally optimized to deliver economics at scale in the cloud,” he said.

The new serverless data integration feature gives customers the ability to design and deploy cloud-native serverless data integration pipelines in Snowflake and other cloud data warehouses. Serverless technology eliminates the need to set up servers and software each time a program is run by activating services automatically in response to an event.

“Customer 360” functionality is provided through a self-service portal that can be used to analyze customer behavior for better segmentation and personalization.

Informatica is also expanding its Data Asset Analytics data marketplace to the Snowflake platform and enhancing it with crowdsourcing features, data usage ratings and an advanced data asset request framework. Data Asset Analytics works with the company’s data catalog to give users an assortment of tools for viewing, measuring and optimizing data value by capturing and organizing event and audit history information as metadata is ingested, enriched and used.

The new features for Snowflake will be available across all cloud data warehouses the company supports, a list that also includes AWS’ Redshift, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Synapse, Google LLC’s BigQuery and  Databricks Inc.’s Unified Data Warehouse, Ghai said. Snowflake users can use the company’s ingestion and curation engine for import up to 1 billion rows per month at no charge. Beyond that level, consumption-based pricing applies.

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