Snowflake and Microsoft announce expansion of their partnership
Microsoft Fabric OneLake will support Apache Iceberg and bi-directional data access between Snowflake and Fabric.
Microsoft is excited to announce an expanded partnership with Snowflake, marking a significant step forward in our commitment to providing customers with a seamless data experience. This will enable bi-directional data access between Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric, ensuring more efficient and flexible data management.
With the launch of Fabric, we introduced OneLake—a single, unified, software as a service (SaaS) open data foundation, establishing our commitment to open standards. We are now taking our commitment to open standards further by including support for Iceberg, in addition to Delta Lake in Microsoft Fabric OneLake. This means that applications that support Iceberg (including Snowflake) or Delta Lake can interoperate with Fabric. This empowers our customers with diverse environments to work across applications and platforms, with OneLake providing an open data lake foundation for unifying their data estate.
Microsoft Fabric
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What are we announcing?
Microsoft and Snowflake are working to enable the following capabilities, which will light up over the coming months:
- OneLake will support Iceberg, alongside Delta Lake. This will be done using the Apache XTable project that both Microsoft and Snowflake are committed to.
- Snowflake will be able to store data in Iceberg format in OneLake.
- Data written by either platform, Snowflake or Fabric, will be available in both Iceberg and Delta Lake formats through XTable translation in OneLake.
- Snowflake will be able to read any Fabric data artifact in OneLake, stored physically or virtually through shortcuts.
- Snowflake data items will light up experiences in any of the Fabric engines as well as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure AI Studio, and Copilot for Microsoft 365.
What does it mean for you?
With this integration, you will be able to work with a single copy of your data across Snowflake and Fabric, regardless of whether the data is stored using Delta Lake or Iceberg format. This enables a number of compelling scenarios:
- Bi-directional data access across Fabric and Snowflake ensures that data can be analyzed across any of the engines in Fabric, or in Snowflake, depending on the customer’s needs.
- You will also be able to access your data through your favorite apps such as Microsoft 365, Copilot for Microsoft 365, and Studio.
- With OneLake data accessible in both Snowflake and Fabric, you can reduce the time spent integrating applications and organizing your data estate, reduce the costs of duplicating data across various locations, and dedicate more time to discovering insights.
“We’ve heard from many of our mutual customers that they want increased interoperability across Snowflake and Fabric in a seamless, cost-efficient manner. As both Snowflake and Microsoft are firm believers in open standards, we see our joint support for Apache Iceberg as an opportunity to offer customers choice when it comes to how and where they interact with their data.”
—Christian Kleinerman, Executive Vice President of Product at Snowflake
Unify your data estate
The rationale behind this expanded partnership is clear: to give our customers an edge in harnessing their digital investments by helping them simplify and unify their data estate with OneLake in Fabric. By combining the strengths of Microsoft Fabric and Snowflake, two leading data platforms, we are further expanding our commitment to open standards, and empowering our customers to do more with their data with the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform.
Learn the latest about Fabric in our blog “Unlock real-time insights with AI-powered analytics in Microsoft Fabric.”
