While business growth is the goal for most companies regardless of size, it often introduces an unintended consequence: data fragmentation. As a company grows, teams increasingly rely on multiple data platforms, scattering critical information across an organization. This lack of a unified view makes it nearly impossible to gain accurate, real-time insights into the business, resulting in a host of costly efficiency drains, including data duplication, significantly longer time to insight and less trustworthy AI initiatives.
This is why many organizations are choosing an open lakehouse approach. This increasingly common architecture pattern allows you to connect your data silos by combining the flexibility and scale of a data lake with the performance and reliability of a data warehouse. By fully embracing Apache Iceberg as the industry standard for open table formats, you can gain fast, governed access to all data — no matter where it lives. You have the flexibility to choose where to store your data, while still leveraging it across multiple platforms without vendor lock-in.
Snowflake and Microsoft are committed to enabling our customers to connect their data estate to build an open lakehouse on their own terms. Earlier this year we shared several milestones we’d reached in making Snowflake — the data and AI platform for the AI era — and Microsoft OneLake — the single, unified SaaS data lake underpinning Microsoft Fabric — interoperable by natively integrating open standards. Together, we enable you to more easily access all your data across both platforms without complexity or data duplication. At Microsoft Ignite, we shared that it’s now even easier to work on a single copy of data across Microsoft OneLake and Snowflake with new user interfaces in both platforms. This means you can seamlessly query OneLake-managed tables from Snowflake without having to move any data. And vice versa: You can easily view and query Snowflake managed Apache Iceberg™ tables in Microsoft Fabric. Check out this blog post for more details on additional capabilities now available through this integration. With an open lakehouse built on Snowflake and OneLake, you can unlock the possibilities of AI powered by your connected and governed data, now with easier access.
With native support for Iceberg, Snowflake and OneLake allow you to freely choose the best storage location, compute and service for your workloads. You retain full control over storage and catalog ownership, enabling long-term flexibility and supporting compliance. Here are a few scenarios in which you can benefit from this enhanced interoperability:
Connect your data estate: Federate from Iceberg REST catalogs with Snowflake catalog-linked databases to automatically discover and access fresh data. Snowflake’s unified platform eliminates fragmented governance controls and operational complexity. Whether your data is in OneLake tables, OneLake shortcuts, eventstreams, Snowflake native tables or any other Iceberg REST-compatible catalog, you get a single, governed view for all data and workloads — with no need to stitch together multiple engines.
Streamline pipelines: Leverage automated and declarative tools that manage the infrastructure for you. You can run existing Apache SparkTM code directly on Snowflake’s engine using Snowpark Connect for Apache SparkTM for faster performance at a lower total cost of ownership. You can build declarative low-latency pipelines with Dynamic Tables for Iceberg and let Snowflake build, maintain and automatically refresh as source data changes.
Work your way: Leverage Snowflake’s native development interfaces or bring your own IDE. Whether you’re working in SQL, Python or Java, run your preferred libraries with Snowpark securely.
Power your analytics and AI: Snowflake’s well-established engine delivers world-class price for performance for analytics and AI on open formats, with seamless integration into Microsoft’s ecosystem. If you’re building an agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio or a business application with Microsoft Power Platform, you can integrate your data in Snowflake with your Microsoft solutions to enrich your results without any data movement. And all data from OneLake can be extended to Snowflake for cross-cloud AI, applications, sharing and collaboration, among many other workloads.
Accelerate your analytics and deliver advanced insights: With this interoperability, leverage your data across both platforms to enhance your analytics. You can create interactive reports and dashboards with Power BI to deliver real-time insights based on data in both platforms, allowing for informed decision-making for your entire organization. It’s never been easier to set up and connect in real time.
Marketing leaders Jessica Hawk, Corporate Vice President at Azure Marketing, and Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake, recently sat down to discuss how this improved interoperability enables enterprises to do more with their data and how both organizations are helping customers and their own teams leverage AI like never before. Check it out here.
Still have questions about the integration?
Watch the recent ”Ask Me Anything: Fabric and Snowflake Interoperability” webinar, where we answered questions on how to most effectively combine these platforms.
Ready to build an open lakehouse with Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric?
Get started with OneLake table APIs for Iceberg.
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