Data engineers love to use SQL to solve all kinds of data problems. For this and more, Snowflake is a perfect partner. Snowflake’s support for standard SQL and several SQL variations, combined with JavaScript stored procedures, has helped me solve complex data challenges. But sometimes you might have the need for custom code.

Snowflake connected with Margaret Sherman of Sonos at Data Cloud Summit 2020 to hear how the company is using the Data Cloud to understand customer preferences and enhance listening experiences. In a world where people are surrounded by a lot of noise, purity of sound in music and other content we seek out in the comfort of our homes can offer a welcome respite. There are lessons to be learned from a company reinventing home audio for today and tomorrow—and using the Data Cloud to do it.

Last year, Gartner declared that on-premises databases are now legacy technology. Are we ready to say the same for analytics and BI?

The 2020 Marketing LUMAscape showcases more than 8,000 tools marketers can use to generate leads, drive brand awareness, and measure all their marketing efforts. But with all those tools, comes a lot of disparate and siloed data. How do you bring them all together in a consistent, reliable, and fast way to understand your ROI, determine attribution, and see which of your marketing efforts are working?

In June, Snowflake announced the public preview of the external functions feature with support for calling external APIs via AWS API Gateway. With external functions, you can easily extend your data pipelines by calling out to external services, third-party libraries, or even your own custom logic, enabling exciting new use cases. For example, you can use external functions for external tokenization, geocoding, scoring data using pre-trained machine learning models, and much more.