A Complete Deep Dive Into the Snowflake Data Marketplace

The recent CIO’s Data and Analytics Summit revealed how data is transformed to become a valuable asset by various leaders worldwide. With that, it also showed how businesses are looking for new ways to implement data monetization, such as through licensing data or participating in data trading.

All this scrambling to monetize data and maximize business returns has led to the creation of the data marketplace, an architecture that enables quick and easy data sharing and monetization. One of the evolving platforms is Snowflake, a system that makes it easier for business to monetize their data securely and effectively.

However, what makes the Snowflake data marketplace stand out from other marketplaces out there, and why is it so significant? In this guide, we’ll go into the benefits and features of the data marketplace. Plus, we’ll go over why you should buy into a data marketplace in the first place.

What is the Snowflake Marketplace?

Data serves as an emerging organizational asset to leaders in a number of different industries, whether it’s healthcare or technology that they work with. These leaders are all about looking for the right data quality at the optimal level to reach the intended people. They also want to make sure the correct data reach the people at the best time with their best intentions.

Snowflake data marketplace serves as a data platform where companies can make online or in-store transactions, facilitating a secure way to buy and sell data. With the help of a third-party platform like Google Analytics, expect an increased speed of volume at delivering a variety of data within your company.

Additionally, data consumers can quickly access data through Snowflake’s data marketplace. Data set queries are also available to help leaders make more informed data-driven decisions. Snowflake customers are able to access published data sets created by data providers. Plus, data providers can also add available data analytics services via subscriptions or other means.

Snowflake data marketplace is also readily available once you have a Snowflake account. You can easily view it on the platform’s interface, where you can choose from a wide variety of data providers.

Moreover, because Snowflake’s data marketplace allows real-time and live updates, leaders leveraging this can easily view the upgrades available from specific data providers. The result is that it helps you drive more business insights, giving more value to your organization overall.

Data Marketplace Snowflake

Now that you’ve got a big-picture idea of the Snowflake data marketplace, let’s go over a few of the finer details of the marketplace.

Data marketplace by Snowflake offers several key features, such as successful data democratization and easier collaboration. 

Each of these features and benefits makes it easier for businesses to carry out their functions and achieve goals. Here’s a closer look at these as well as a deep dive into how to integrate the Snowflake data marketplace with Revelate.

Features

Snowflake data marketplace contributes to a successful data democratization strategy. It’s a platform where data consumers and producers can network with each other to establish fruitful business relationships. For instance, data consumers can become providers by using purchased data to augment their existing datasets, making them more valuable and reselling them to other organizations. However, the consumer may rely on a specific data provider to continue to provide a steady stream of data, allowing this business venture to continue.

This full-circle networking is just one of the features of the Snowflake marketplace. Here are some more features that make Snowflake marketing a leading platform:

Let’s break down each of these features in a bit more detail.

Robust Data Search Catalog

One thing to know about the Snowflake data marketplace is it features a mature data search catalog. This creates a more flexible and robust search capability to improve focused search results and overall user satisfaction.

Snowflake utilizes structured category hierarchies to produce data assets accompanied by search terms acquired from user tags and business glossaries. Snowflake also captures ontological nuances, but these don’t hinder the platform from showing focused search results.

Snowflake’s data catalog accommodates filters, facets, and free-text searching while delivering results based on a relevant algorithm.

Effective Change Management

Effective change management helps create awareness within the user community. This can be achieved by generating early feedback while anticipating potential benefits. Moreover, Snowflake works with real-use scenarios from users. This ensures the product is brought closer to the users, allowing them to determine tangible benefits and areas that need improvement.

With Snowflake’s robust and well-planned change management, the data marketplace has a well-executed communication program for the success of data democratization.

Quick User Adoption

If you want your organization to have an interesting and active data community, your data marketplace should resemble a one-stop shop where users can find all the data they need. Quick user adoption entails collaborating with all involved parties so that business insights can be published back to the data marketplace.

The Snowflake marketplace improves its search quality through crowdsourcing business glossaries and metadata enrichment. Every time a user is able to find what he wants, the marketplace’s user adoption increases.

Easy Connectivity

Being successful in finding the data users need is one thing. Connecting the data they find to their desired tool for analysis is another. Thankfully, the Snowflake data marketplace features seamless connectivity with data analytical and scientific tools, which could improve the user’s satisfaction.

When leveraging any marketplace, you should be able to connect conveniently with data, people, and tools without leaving the platform. And with these come different pain points, including the following:

• Wrangle
• Manipulate
• Prepare data using the available tools before analysis commences

Snowflake’s data marketplace is capable of assisting and eradicating these pain points in order to create better data preparation, discovery, and analysis—all within the same Snowflake platform.

Efficient Collaboration Among the Team

If you want to improve your organization’s data set, you must be open to successful collaborations among data experts, users, and other groups. This data socialization is ideal for a better data science culture and openness on a data marketplace platform.

Snowflake’s data marketplace allows users to place comments or ratings that users can see and use as a basis for their data-driven decisions.

Proper Onboarding of New Sources of Data

During data migration from one cloud to another, Snowflake’s data marketplace ensures data silos are prevented. This makes the marketplace’s search catalog more refined, guaranteeing users are still able to find the data they need within a reliable time frame.

Snowflake also ensures data management processes are formalized so that proper data published is curated. This creates more valuable and relevant customer-ready data.

Benefits

Valuable data has always been part of effective business communications within companies. And thanks to big data, more business professionals rely upon making data-driven decisions to expand and grow in the current competitive digital landscape. Snowflake’s data marketplace allows investors and business leaders to stay ahead of their competitors by providing the platform to find the data they need to improve every aspect of their business.

Pitney Bowes revealed more businesses deciding to increase their overall expenses on data marketplace initiatives. The same survey revealed more than 54% of business leaders are willing to spend more, and 37% of the respondents don’t care about spending more than $10,000 for a specific worthy data set.

The decision of business providers and other companies utilizing Snowflake’s data marketplace stems from a wide range of benefits:

• Increased ROI for the business
• Improved risk management and predictive models
• Gain more new customers
• Enhanced productivity
• Broaden opportunity horizons to become industry disruptors
• Improve business processes, including reducing cycle time and increasing throughput

Aside from the above benefits that call for businesses making better data-driven decisions, companies can also enjoy the advantages of selling their data. Data monetization involves transforming relevant information into a way businesses can generate income, even with datasets that are of little to no use to data-providing organizations.

A report by Forrester revealed that unused data within a company could reach at least 60% to 73%. That means a huge amount of irrelevant and unused data is taking up your cloud. Why not make these datasets significant by selling and monetizing them?

Snowflake’s data marketplace also allows faster data discovery because it creates centralized storage for your potential data needs. And because the platform is API-enabled, you can trust that data speeds are reliable and innovative to stay on track with your business goals.

Integration with Revelate

Probably one of the main reasons users love going back to Snowflake’s data marketplace is its integration and collaboration with Revelate. As a cloud-based data fulfillment platform that is platform agnostic, Revelate fills an important gap for Snowflake: it allows data to be extracted from the Snowflake platform and fulfilled in another platform. For instance, if a dataset exists within Snowflake but the data consumer needs to use it within Azure or AWS, Revelate can facilitate that transaction.

Additionally, Revelate is fully automated, which significantly reduces possible human errors that can affect security, access, and the overall user experience and customer satisfaction.

The Snowflake and Revelate partnership gives users the flexibility to choose where they desire to list data products⁠—directly into Snowflake’s data marketplace or through Revelate’s white-labeled environment. Ultimately, Revelate helps simplify and centralize data sharing in a single environment because it is platform agnostic.

Unlock Your Data's Potential with Revelate

Revelate provides a suite of capabilities for data sharing and data commercialization for our customers to fully realize the value of their data. Harness the power of your data today!

Get Started

Sharing Data Securely With Snowflake Data Share

One of the exclusive features you can utilize in Snowflake is its secure data sharing. This allows users to share particular database objects with others who own a Snowflake account. You can share anything from the following:

1. External tables
2. Tables
3. Secure views
4. Secure UDFs
5. Secure Materialized views

Shares are created through Snowflake’s data providers, while data consumers can import them. Plus, users can guarantee no actual copying or transfer of data between Snowflake accounts. 

Sharing occurs through Snowflake’s metadata store and services layer. What sets this apart from other platforms’ data sharing is that you don’t need to worry about acquired data taking up your already minimized storage space. This also means the data shared with you will not contribute to your overall monthly data storage expenses. And because there is no actual data exchanged or copied, data providers and consumers will find it easy to set up secure data sharing, as well as its accessibility:

1. Data providers create shares of a database using their account.
2. They will grant access to their chosen objects within the database
3. Providers are also able to share data from several databases, provided that they are placed within the same account.
4. Data consumers obtain a read-only database file from the share.

This unique architecture enables Snowflake to create an extensive network where data providers can freely share data with various data consumers.

However, there will still be charges due to computing resources like virtual warehouses used for shared-data querying. 

Data Sharing in Different Regions and Cloud Platforms

Data sharing across different regions is available on Snowflake. That’s considering your account is hosted on any cloud platform listed below:

• Google Cloud Platform
• Amazon Web Services
• Microsoft Azure

Utilizing cross-region data sharing means you should understand database replication and how it works. It should be a part of your entire planning process. Another important consideration is that data providers must create a single dataset copy per region.

Users can utilize Snowflake’s secure data sharing in all platform editions except VPS or Virtual Private Snowflake. But special considerations should also be looked into if you desire to share from a Business Critical to a different account:

• There should be a signed Business Associate Agreement between the targeted accounts before permitting data-sharing
• Sharing of sensitive data is not permitted between a non-Business Critical and a Business Critical account
• If sensitive data should be utilized, users should leverage Secure Views. These hide view definitions from users who are not granted access privileges.

Set Up Data Replication

Setting up and configuring your data replication should first start with creating an account based on the region where you will likely share your data. Then, you must link the new account to your old local account.

The following tasks are essential while you set up your data replication:

1. Creating an ORGADMIN role using one of your accounts and linking your accounts for replication
2. Making your local account’s existing database the primary database
3. Replicating your current database to other regions

Share Data with Data Consumers

After data replication, you must complete the following tasks to allow data-sharing with data consumers:

• Create a share and add objects to it
• Add or register consumer accounts to the share

Execute from Source Account

You still need to enable data replication of your primary database so that it works in your other databases created in other regions. To achieve this, you must execute specific SQL commands.

Execute from Target Account

Likewise, execution from a target account also entails using several SQL commands from your target account in a different region.

Marketplace Snowflake: Provider vs. Consumer Functionality

When utilizing Snowflake’s data marketplace, people need to understand the fine line between being a data provider and a consumer on the platform. Knowing each individual’s functionality will make it easier for users to obtain the data they need and monetize them according to the integration of Snowflake with Revelate.

Data Providers

Data providers are Snowflake account holders who are able to create shares and allow data consumers to consume them. The primary responsibility of a data provider is to ensure a database is open for other Snowflake accounts to utilize or view.

Additionally, Snowflakes grants granular access control to the database’s selected objects whenever you share a database. Even better, the platform does not limit or restrict you on how many shares you can create or how many accounts you’re sharing it with.

Suppose you want to be eligible to become an approved Snowflake marketplace data provider. In that case, you must comply with the following requirements:

1. You own a signed Snowflake provider agreement and own an account in supported regions.
2. Your data for sharing should be regularly updated, legally shareable, and real with no sample or test data.
3. You should solely set up the provider profile. It’s where you can upload your business logo and add information about your company name and contact number.
4. The provider profile is also where you can briefly describe your company and what data you are sharing.

When deciding to list data on Snowflake’s data marketplace, you can choose from two main types: standard and personalized data listings.

Standard data listings grant data consumers instant access to a series of published data sets. In turn, the listing shall provide consumers with aggregated, non-customer-specific, and generic data.

On the other hand, personalized data listings allow consumers to ask for particular data sets. We recommend data producers provide customers with generic standard data listings while also allowing them to request personalized data, depending on the profit generated.

Some data providers have allowed data monetization or sharing with data sets coming from their usual business operations.

Data Consumers

Businesses and organizations that access or buy data from the providers are data consumers or buyers. Data consumers can choose from various databases eligible for sharing, which data providers create.

As data consumers, you have the opportunity to access and identify objects for query within the database, similar to how you would utilize your own database from your account.

What’s unique about Snowflake is that anyone can become both a data provider and a consumer. You can acquire data from outside sources to enrich and augment your existing data – simultaneously while allowing other users to buy your own data.

Conclusion

Snowflake’s data marketplace might just be the next big thing that happens to your company’s proper data utilization, management, and sharing. The platform allows seamless connectivity and collaboration among data providers and consumers for optimal and secure data sharing, minimizing potential breaches and fraud.

Through Snowflake’s robust search catalog and effective change management, you can guarantee an overall improved user experience when utilizing the platform’s marketplace. Moreover, the marketplace allows data monetization, a way for business leaders to generate income by selling their own data.

By finding the right data provider and comparing your possibilities, you can gauge which is best for your organization ⁠—one that would ensure you get the data you need quickly.

Even better, Snowflake collaborates with Revelate⁠—a fully automated cloud-based platform that helps make your data management safer and more convenient. Get started with Revelate today to handle your data properly and make it work for your organization.

Unlock Your Data's Potential with Revelate

Revelate provides a suite of capabilities for data sharing and data commercialization for our customers to fully realize the value of their data. Harness the power of your data today!

Get Started