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Snowflake horizon and Ataccama: a strong partnership for trusted and governed data

Snowflake Horizon and Ataccama: A Strong Partnership for Trusted and Governed Data Cover Image
Ravi Kumar

Blog contributor: Ravi Kumar
Ravi currently serves as Senior Partner Sales Engineer for Powered By Snowflake and Cybersecurity, Security, Observability and Governance Partners at Snowflake. Kumar helps these partners build state-of-the art apps and create robust solutions both integrated with and built on Snowflake.

Snowflake's customer base grew by 24% in the last year [1], and it’s not surprising.

Organizations choose Snowflake for all the right reasons: easy & robust data ingest, scalability, sharing, storage, processing, and visualization capabilities. However, organizations need more than a platform for data accessibility and management. As their data landscapes grow in volume and complexity, the challenge of maintaining data quality and governance becomes more pronounced.

Enter Snowflake Horizon, Snowflake’s new built-in governance solution for the Data Cloud, and Ataccama ONE, the market’s leading AI-powered data management platform.

Snowflake Horizon is Snowflake’s built-in governance solution with a unified set of compliance, security, privacy, interoperability, and access capabilities that makes it easy for customers to govern and take immediate action on data, apps, and more.

Snowflake Horizon

Ataccama integration with the Snowflake Data Cloud

As a member of the Snowflake Horizon Partner Ecosystem, Ataccama has invested heavily in the native integration with the Snowflake Data Cloud to bring accessible and easy-to-use data quality and data governance capabilities to Snowflake users. That’s why clients like T-Mobile have chosen Ataccama as their platform of choice for ensuring the quality and governance of their Snowflake data at scale.

Ataccama ONE offers a complete data quality and governance solution on Snowflake, offering users robust functionality for:

  • Data catalog & profiling
  • Data observability
  • Data quality monitoring
  • Data lineage

All of these capabilities are available out of the box once you connect your Snowflake instance and are augmented by Ataccama ONE AI, our AI engine.

Data catalog & profiling

Import metadata directly from Snowflake into Ataccama ONE Data Catalog to manage your data, including tags in the business glossary, in one business-friendly user interface. Ataccama ONE profiles data and automatically detects new business terms, including PII.

From the Ataccama ONE Data Catalog, you can also see rich data profiling information on any data set, like frequency analysis, duplicates & null counts, pattern analysis, and more.

With this information, users can understand the business meaning of data and its state and then decide whether they want to use it for their projects and analysis.

Data Catalog Screenshot

Data observability

Effortlessly monitor your data in Snowflake with Ataccama ONE’s AI-powered data observability capabilities, which detect unexpected changes in data, freshness, schema changes, and new data tags, all with minimal configuration required.

With this functionality, data teams can quickly set up the monitoring of their data in Snowflake without configuring complex rules and involving business stakeholders.

Snowflake DO

Data quality monitoring

On top of the automated data observability capabilities, Ataccama ONE includes a complete data quality monitoring solution based on specific checks, which you can configure in a collaborative workflow for business and technical users:

  1. Create, manage, and reuse all the data quality rules in Ataccama ONE’s business-friendly interface.
  2. Ataccama ONE will suggest and auto-map rules to Snowflake tables.
  3. Rule evaluation happens in Snowflake.
  4. Consume data quality information via data quality dashboards in Ataccama ONE.

Ensure optimal performance and conformance to security requirements with Ataccama ONE’s pushdown processing, which keeps data quality rule evaluation and execution local to your Snowflake environment.

Learn more about pushdown on Snowflake here.

Snowflake pushdown diagram

Data lineage

Connect to your Snowflake instance, and Ataccama's lineage toolkit will import metadata from the dictionary and query log, parse the SQLs, and build a runtime lineage diagram in Ataccama ONE.

Business lineage in Ataccama incorporates insights from the data catalog and data quality monitoring to simplify root cause analysis and impact analysis for data engineers, DBAs, and data stewards.

Snowflake Lineage

The future roadmap

As a key Snowflake partner, we are just getting started. Throughout 2024, we will be enhancing our data quality and governance capabilities accessed through Snowflake Horizon, including:

  • Data quality: Support advanced DQ rule types with pushdown processing.
  • Introduce improved data lineage for Snowflake.
  • dbt integration: dbt is a popular choice for data transformation in Snowflake. That is why we’re adding the ability to use dbt as an execution engine for Ataccama rules. This means you can keep managing rules in Ataccama, and now you can reuse them for your dbt jobs.

Learn more about our Snowflake partnership or set up a meeting to discuss your needs.

Meet with us at Snowflake Data Cloud Summit in San Francisco on June 3-6.

[1] Snowflake Reports Financial Results for the Third Quarter of Fiscal 2024