My feet hurt, my voice is gone, and I have accumulated 30 t-shirts. Snowflake Summit 2025 is a wrap!
It was an incredible week in San Francisco. While there were dozens of announcements, here are the Top 5 that will actually change your day-to-day job.
1. Cortex Agents (GA)#
The Keynote demo showed a user typing: “Find the root cause of the sales dip in Q1.” The Cortex Agent didn’t just write SQL. It:
- Queried
SALES. - Noticed a correlation with
INVENTORY_LEVELS. - Generated a chart.
- Emailed the Supply Chain manager.
Multi-step, autonomous agents are now real, and governed.
2. Unmanaged Iceberg Tables as Default#
Snowflake announced that for new accounts, creating a table can default to Iceberg format without user intervention. This signals a massive commitment to the open lakehouse architecture.
3. “Snowpipe Real-time”#
A successor to Snowpipe Streaming. It offers sub-second latency with transformations. You can now write Python streaming logic directly in the pipe, eliminating the need for a separate Apache Flink cluster for many use cases.
4. Native Apps with External Connectivity#
Native Apps can now securely talk to external APIs (Salesforce, Stripe, Slack) via a new governed egress gateway. This opens up the ability to build full-stack SaaS apps on Snowflake that aren’t isolated silos.
5. The “Visual SQL” Builder#
A new node-based UI in Snowsight for building queries. It looks like Alteryx or Informatica but compiles down to pure, optimized SQL. Great for the less code-heavy analysts on the team.
Conclusion#
The theme of 2025 was clear: “Actionable Data.” It’s no longer about just storing and reporting; it’s about agents and apps that do things.