What's New in Snowflake Summit 2025

The main innovations and improvements revealed at the Snowflake summit 2025 are highlighted in this blog, but there is more to come.

1. Get Started with Agentic AI with No Code

Agentic AI refers to AI systems that proactively assist users by understanding context, initiating actions, and automating tasks. Snowflake's agentic AI experiences enable both technical and non-technical users to utilise and interact with AI and data using natural language, without writing a single line of code. The key features highlighted are:

• Data Science Agent (coming soon in private preview): Your ML copilot that can automate feature engineering, training, and more using plain English.
• Cortex AISQL (public preview): Cortex AISQL enables users to utilize SQL to analyze documents, images, and other unstructured data types. Now includes schema-aware table extraction from complex PDFs.
• Cortex AI Agents (public preview): You can use natural language to ask questions, analyze structured and unstructured data, and take action, all within the Snowflake platform.

Bonus: All of this operates within Snowflake's secure perimeter, maintaining governance and privacy by default.

2. Unified Data Engineering and Interoperability

Snowflake is solving rigid data pipelines and slow ingestion issues with new tools built for flexibility and speed. Let's have a look:

• Snowflake OpenFlow (powered by Apache NiFi): A managed, extensible, multimodal low-code ingestion platform. It includes hundreds of connectors to eliminate data silos. To facilitate smooth ETL processing for AI, OpenFlow transforms data movement within Snowflake.
• Native dbt Integration (coming soon): With Git and AI Copilot built-in, you can develop and run dbt models natively within Snowsight UI.
• Iceberg Table Enhancements: You can work effortlessly with external catalogs using the Iceberg REST API. It supports VARIANT data types and Merge-on-Read for semi-structured data.
• DevOps-Ready: Snowflake Workspaces now support custom Git URLs and Python 3.9. Terraform provider is now generally available.

3. Analytics with AI-Driven Acceleration

Analytics just got smarter, faster, and easier to scale with the following updates:

• Snowflake Semantic Views (public preview): It provides excellent support for BI teams, and you can create consistent, reusable business metrics and entities within Snowflake.
• Gen2 Warehouses: Generation 2 (Gen2) is a modernized version of Snowflake's standard warehouse, featuring enhanced hardware and improved performance capabilities. It provides a 2.1x performance boost for analytical queries with enhanced scans, DELETEs, and MERGEs.
• SnowConvert AI: A free, automatic tool for auto-converting legacy ETL/BI code to Snowflake. It reduces risk and saves migration costs.

4. Smarter Marketplace to Share, Sell & Collaborate Easily

Snowflake is making it easier to monetize AI apps and datasets using:

• Cortex Knowledge Extensions: While maintaining IP protection, embed real-time info from Stack Overflow, AP, Packt, and more into your apps.
• Semantic Model Sharing (private preview): Rely on natural language to explore datasets across internal teams or external partners.
• Agentic Snowflake Native Apps: You can easily build and sell no-code, AI-powered apps directly through the Snowflake Marketplace.

5. The Future of Platform: Adaptive, Governed & Secure

Snowflake isn't just innovating; it's redefining what a modern data platform should be in the following ways:

• Adaptive Compute (Adaptive Warehouses): You can automatically adjust resources based on workload, delivering speed without overspending.
• Horizon Catalog (private preview): It enables users to easily discover and govern external data sources, such as dashboards and relational databases.
• Copilot for Governance (coming soon): Users can utilize this feature to manage metadata, access policies, and security using natural language.
• Security Upgrades: To improve account protection, enhanced MFA, password policies, and a revamped Trust Center are being implemented.
• Snowflake Trail: You can debug pipelines and optimize your generative AI agents and apps using new observability features.

Summing Up

Snowflake Summit 2025 showcased the company's push toward an Agentic AI enterprise data platform. Snowflake's advanced features, including Cortex AISQL, OpenFlow, dbt integration, and native app frameworks, are democratizing AI and making it easier for users. Whether you're a data scientist, engineer, or business leader, Snowflake's latest innovations promise faster time-to-insight, reduced complexity, and deeper control over your data universe.

What Are Spatial Parameters?

Spatial parameters in Tableau allow you to dynamically interact with geospatial data within your visualizations. These parameters enable you to select spatial objects like points, polygons, multi-polygons, lines, or collections for calculations. Unlike traditional parameters, which work with values like text or numbers, spatial parameters offer the flexibility to work with geospatial data like coordinates and spatial shapes. You can create spatial parameters in two ways: 1. From a data source: If your data contains spatial fields (like latitude and longitude), you can load these as spatial parameters. 2. Using Well-Known Text (WKT) : This method allows you to manually input spatial data in text format to create custom spatial parameters. Spatial parameters can be used in the same way as other parameters in Tableau, including parameter controls, actions, and dynamic values. Note: Spatial parameters can only be created from spatial data fields (such as latitude and longitude). Creating spatial parameters from text string fields, like a "Country" field, is not feasible as it might be assigned as a geographic role but remains a text field.

Top Benefits of Using Spatial Parameters

Spatial parameters have offered immense possibilities for Tableau experts to analyze and visualize geospatial data. Key benefits are listed below: 1. Cross-Data Source Spatial Exploration With spatial parameters, you can explore spatial relationships between data sources that don't support joins. Unlike traditional data sources, which can be limited by join constraints, spatial parameters allow you to compare spatial regions from different datasets. This means you can dynamically analyze relationships across multiple data sources without the need for complex joins. 2. Skip Long Joins Previously, working with large spatial datasets required time-consuming spatial joins. Now, spatial parameters enable you to bypass these long joins and conduct spatial analysis much faster. You can use parameters to compare regions across multiple data sources instantly, even with vast datasets. 3. Interactive and Dynamic Analysis Spatial parameters allow users to visually interact with geospatial data in real time. Like other parameter types, you can use parameter controls to input points, lines, or polygons and adjust your analysis on the fly. This flexibility allows you to dynamically change spatial boundaries and relationships during your analysis. 4. Distance-Based Queries With spatial parameters, you can perform distance-based queries without complex calculations. For example, you can control the size of a buffer and see what lies within that buffer directly from the worksheet. This makes it easy to conduct proximity analysis without the need for complicated formulas. 5. Create Custom Regions Spatial parameters allow you to create custom regions by selecting points, lines, and polygons and combining them into a single parameter. For instance, you can create a sales region by combining multiple states into one spatial parameter. This enables you to tailor regions for specific analysis scenarios.

Spatial Calculations in Tableau 2024.3: What’s New

Tableau 2024.3 also introduces three new spatial calculations to help you evaluate spatial relationships: • SYMDIFFERENCE: Identifies areas that are unique between two regions. • INTERSECTION: Shows the overlap or intersection between two regions. • DIFFERENCE: Displays areas present in one region but not in the other. These new spatial calculations provide powerful tools to analyze and compare geospatial data.

Union Aggregation for Spatial Data

In previous versions of Tableau, the only aggregation available for spatial data was Collect, which groups spatial elements together. Union Aggregation has been introduced in Tableau 2024.3, allowing you to dissolve the boundaries between regions and providing even greater flexibility in working with spatial data.

Validating Spatial Calculations

Tableau 2024.2 introduced the Validate Calculation feature, which can help you detect and correct errors in your spatial data. This tool is handy when working with complex spatial datasets. Tableau's new Spatial Parameters and related features, such as spatial calculations and union aggregation, provide powerful capabilities for geospatial analysis. Whether comparing spatial regions, performing proximity-based queries, or creating custom areas, these features enable dynamic and flexible analysis beyond traditional methods.

How Beinex Can Assist You

Beinex, a premier Tableau partner, provides sustainable analytics solutions to organizations and helps to build superior data visual analytics capabilities internally through our bespoke training programs. Our team of Tableau-certified consultants are real-life Tableau business users passionate about Tableau and delivering a world-class experience. Connect with us for a free demo: https://www.beinex.com/free-tableau-software/

The AWS Partner Awards recognise a wide range of Partners, whose business models have embraced specialisation and collaboration over the past year. The AWS Partner Awards also recognise AWS Partners whose business models continue to evolve and thrive on the AWS Cloud as they work with customers to conceive, build and migrate cloud-native solutions on AWS. Receiving the Award, Indumon Das, the Founder and Managing Director of Beinex, remarked, "We leverage the capabilities of AWS and combine that with the Analytics Consulting power of Beinex to bring unmatched success to our customers. We look forward to the launch of the AWS data centers in the UAE in the first half of 2022. The launch will have a big impact on the growth and acceleration of cloud adoption in the Middle East and we are excited to support organizations to take advantage of what it has to offer." The AWS Partner Network (APN) is the global community of businesses using AWS to build solutions and services for customers. AWS helps partners build, market, and sell their offerings by providing valuable business, marketing, and technical support on top of our proven, global, and secure infrastructure. AWS partners are uniquely positioned to help customers take full advantage of all that AWS has to offer and accelerate their journey to the cloud. AWS has millions of active customers and a dynamic community of over 100,000 partners globally. "AWS Partners add value to customers across a wide range of industries around the world and are critical to their success. We are pleased to recognise a variety of partners through the APN Partner Awards EMEA 2021. I look forward to working together to a great 2022," said Antonio Alonzo Lopez, EMEA Director Partner Success at AWS. About Beinex Beinex, Dubai, is a multinational firm exploring the endless possibilities of data for Cloud, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Automation.

After two very long masked years, the world has slowly started to breathe, again! With lockdowns on and work taking place from the very room you had slept a couple of hours back -- the human universe has been phenomenally re-engineered by a microscopic organism. Your geographical location has been made immaterial in the digital world. But the same cannot be said about data, and this may sound paradoxical and ironic. For instance, an MNC’s location of the data now matters more than ever before. With a major chunk of data of many entities, especially government ones, on the public cloud, the airing of concerns related to data security, data sovereignty, data localisation/ data residency is growing louder in decibel terms.

This is where Hyperforce comes in.

Hyperforce is how Salesforce has reimagined its platform. It is now horizontally scalable, and through tie-ups with major cloud providers, the scalability has grown by leaps and bounds. Imagine you are a B2B company with 10,000 customers or a B2C company with tens of millions of customers: Hyperforce lets you scale up your capabilities and provides you with a single source of truth. But what if you are a multi-geographic business conglomerate in a heavily regulated industry like finance or health? How will you comply with data sovereignty, data localisation/ data residency requirements? Hyperforce’s collaboration with public cloud companies ensures that the data can be located at any specified place in the world, adhering to the local rules of data governance and storage locations. “Choose the location where your data will be stored to comply with regulations specific to your company, region, or industry — even in highly regulated industries like the public sector,” the store-data-locally-keep-it-compliant-globally mantra tells. Other features Hyperscalable: Hyperforce also enables you to scale the infrastructure as per the needs of the business by letting you access extra computing capacity as and when required. You can employ resources in the public cloud rather quickly. Yes, it is your decision whether to scale up or not, and the elasticity can be dictated by the nature of your requirements. Hypersecure: Also, trust is built-in, which puts security at the forefront of the architecture. Data privacy and security are sacrosanct. This leaves you with enough room to focus on innovation. Hypercompatible: And most important of all, backward compatibility ensures that all the extant Salesforce apps, customisations and integrations will continue to work on Hyperforce regardless of cloud. In the physical world, your geographical location assumes importance. But in the digital world, it is the location of the data that matters. Hyperforce, by virtue of its collaboration with major players in the cloud domain, ensures data residency requirements are adhered to when and where needed. The architecture is hyper-scalable, secure, and comes with backward compatibility. Hyperforce is soon to be launched in the UAE, and Beinex, a Salesforce partner, is all set to carry out implementation and consulting of and for Hyperforce.