Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

We’re excited to announce the general availability of the unstructured data management functionality in Snowflake. We launched public preview of this functionality in September 2021, and since then we have seen adoption by customers across industries for a variety of use cases. These use cases include storing and securing call center recordings, securely sharing PDF documents in Snowflake Data Marketplace, storing medical images and extracting data from them, and many more.

The term “AI-first” has received its share of attention lately, especially in the boardroom where strategies to gain a competitive advantage are always welcome. But before a company embarks on an AI-first strategy, it pays to understand what it is and how it will transform the organization.

To this point, AI has been applied to augment analytics in a somewhat bifurcated fashion. On one hand, we have seen natural language support the business consumer that requires simple answers to known questions, helping them quickly take action. And, on the other, AI helps content authors and BI developers auto-suggest charts and automate data preparation, improving efficiency and reducing manual workloads. But, there’s a gap, and the value is huge.

In 2010, Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, made the startling claim that every two days we humans generate as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization to today, or about five exabytes of data. At the time, we had TB disk drives and could only imagine an exabyte, which is one million terabytes. The next increments from TB is the peta byte and then the zettabyte, which is 1,000 exabytes. By the end of 2010, the world had crossed the zettabyte threshold.