# Snowflake Summit 2023 Keynote Full Breakdown | Snowflake Summit

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2023-07-04
- **Format:** Video · 178 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data engineering, AI & ML, Industry trends
- **Tools:** Snowflake (container services, data sharing, iceberg, native apps, snowpark); Tableau
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/snowflake-summit-2023-keynote-full-breakdown--snowflake-summit
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1WkI5-70qg

I break down the full Snowflake Summit 2023 keynote delivered by Frank Slootman, reacting honestly as a three-year Snowflake customer who pipes YouTube data through Fivetran into Snowflake and visualises it in Tableau. I add context to each concept, from the data cloud and unsiling to data engineering, Snowpark and the three big announcements.

## Key takeaways

- You can't have an AI strategy without a mature data strategy first, expertise to curate training data, skilled analysts and an engaged business all get tested before AI delivers value.
- Snowflake's core differentiator is data sharing, decoupled compute and storage let companies collaborate without the costly replication, bandwidth and egress costs other databases incur.
- The 'snow globe' rendering and orbiting-workloads visuals are marketing tools designed to show where Snowflake wants you to take your data, not neutral pictures of reality.
- The keynote's three headline announcements are expanded Apache Iceberg open table support, a Native Applications Framework and Snowpark Container Services for running whole applications inside the governance perimeter.
- Snowpark can retire legacy Spark jobs and cut data engineering spend by two to four times, which Slootman frames as 'free money to be had'.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Why I'm covering Snowflake
- 1:25 NVIDIA, Jensen and the AI hype
- 4:08 No AI strategy without a data strategy
- 7:44 The data cloud and the snow globe
- 10:36 Fiserv data networking example
- 15:49 Unsiling into a single data universe
- 17:10 Unstructured data and Document AI
- 20:06 Bringing workloads to the data
- 23:24 Warehouses, lakes and hybrid tables
- 27:40 Data engineering and Snowpark
- 31:15 Building applications on the data cloud
- 38:13 Governance as the protective shield

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/snowflake-summit-2023-keynote-full-breakdown--snowflake-summit

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena