Snowflake will natively support Python in its Snowpark development platform

Snowflake announced that it will start supporting Python in its Snowpark development framework.

With the move, Snowflake, a data cloud provider, will broaden its appeal to data scientists, data engineers, and developers, as Python will run natively on the company’s platform. Snowflake announced support for Python at their Snowday event.

Python is one of the most popular programming languages ​​and has just overtaken Java in the ranking.

Snowpark for Python will allow developers to collaborate on data, optimize pipelines, applications and machine learning workflows on the Snowflake platform. Snowflake for Python is a private preview.

According to Snowflake, Snowpark already supports Java and Scala, and the addition of Python is likely to attract more developers. Snowflake recently announced a partnership with Anaconda and launched the Snowpark Accelerator program with pre-built partner integrations.

Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake, said switching to Python was about meeting the developers where they are. “We want to meet customers where they are and give them the choice of language,” he said. “Let them use the tool of their choice.”

According to Kleinerman, Python with the right security and governance will be a differentiator for Snowflake’s platform. Rich libraries should also speed up machine learning pipelines, he added.

John Damalas, CTO of Pacific Life, said Snowflake’s Python support is important to the company’s developers. Damalas said support for Python will improve data preparation and workflows. “It really unlocks a lot of extra abilities,” Damalas said. “It’s not just the language, but the entire Python ecosystem that is now available or will be available in Snowpark.

Snowflake has also rolled out a series of other platform updates, including:

• Cross-cloud account replication, including identity, access controls, governance policies, and resource monitors.
• Replication performance improvements up to 55%.
• Extensive governance tools and integrations, including visibility of lineage in access history and object dependencies.
• Snowpark: stored procedures, a service that schedules application code in Snowflake.
• Snowpark: Unstructured file processing using Java functions in Snowflake.
• Snowpark: Logging Framework, a service that facilitates monitoring and debugging for developers.

These aforementioned updates are a private preview.

Snowflake added that it has increased the number of data providers in its data marketplace and now exceeds 200.