All organizations are faced with the constant challenge of meeting business goals. In the past, business leaders have relied on intuition and fragmented data to make decisions.
However, technology is ever evolving, and the amount of data consumers create in today’s connected world is a testament to that. Because of this reality, business leaders no longer need to guess their next steps – they need to do their homework and execute.
Thanks to a growing partnership between SAS and Snowflake that uses SAS® Viya® and Snowpark Container Services (launching in private preview), organizations can tap into the full potential of their data and use it to improve revenue, increase margins, operate more efficiently and exceed customer expectations.
“Snowflake continues to invest in Snowpark and our expansive partner ecosystem, accelerating how users build in the Data Cloud by reimagining what they can run within Snowflake without tradeoffs,” said Torsten Grabs, Senior Director of Product Management, Snowflake. “With SAS Viya’s capabilities in Snowflake, we are bringing generative AI and decisioning capabilities closer to the data to improve security, data governance and time to insight for customers.”
The use cases for this integration are plenty and can be applied in scenarios including loan origination, marketing personalization and business operations, among others. Let’s explore three ways this collaboration showcases how organizations across all industries can do just that.
1. Say goodbye to data silos and hello to collaboration
With this integration, you can access data in Snowflake via SAS® Viya®. However, it’s just not about data access – the accessibility helps anyone in the organization uncover insights, whether they are from a data scientist or a business user — it’s also about collaboration. And with more than half of AI models failing to make it into production, having the right platform ensures greater visibility and more sharing of information, helping organizations get more out of their data. Paired with SAS® Intelligent Decisioning, leaders can quickly move forward with their business strategies.
“Snowpark Container Services enables our joint customers to use SAS Viya AI and decisioning capabilities in Snowflake to answer critical questions, discover insights and make better decisions,” said Bryan Harris, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at SAS.
2. Ability to create governance rules for bias-free decision making
The process of understanding data is always difficult. That’s where SAS comes in. Most machine learning models never make it to production due to lack of formatting, collaboration between teams, and standardization hurdles. With Viya running directly in Snowflake, these problems can be solved as users can create governance rules for their Snowflake data along various checkpoints to account for bias.
They can also train imported data against historical data, with the best predictive model becoming the champion model. The champion model is then published to Snowpark Container Services through SAS Container Runtime, which then executes the real-time requests against the model.
3. Your data stays secure within SAS and Snowflake
Traditionally, moving data between software solutions has been a hassle, raising security concerns and increasing the risk of human error. Snowpark Container Services runs Viya right from a user’s Snowflake account and streamlines workflows while minimizing data movement. The integration makes security worries a thing of the past, allowing organizations to instead focus on driving data-driven innovation.
SAS and Snowflake provides organizations with a technology integration that helps take their data further by increasing collaboration, forming guard rails around bias and improving security. Each are critical to enabling business agility while remaining competitive in a market with rapidly changing customer tastes.
2 Comments
Hi, we've recently started with Snowflake. We don't have Viya (yet) but we are adding the SAS Snowflake connector to our Enterprise installation on a Windows box. At the moment we're limiting our thinking to just passing datasets between the two environments. However, perhaps you know of some resources or demos that could show us the full potential please?
One thought I had was whether we could use the SAS scheduler to pass commands to Snowflake and effectively manage the workflow tasks on Snowflake that get data from Azure and update Snowflake databases?
Any insight would be appreciated as we're starting from low knowledge base.
Regards
Ross
Hi Ross, here are a couple links to assist you in your SAS + Snowflake journey:
- SAS/ACCESS to Snowflake documentation (https://go.documentation.sas.com/doc/en/pgmsascdc/9.4_3.5/acreldb/p19i7uzcbso1szn1pczxn88co3g1.htm)
- An Insider’s Guide to SAS/ACCESS® Interface to Snowflake (whitepaper) (https://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings20/4103-2020.pdf)
With SAS/ACCESS, there is the capability to push SAS functions and joins down into Snowflake without moving data.
If you have SAS/ACCESS to the respective database on Azure, you could use SAS for various data manipulation tasks between Snowflake and the other database.
Depending on the nature of the workflow tasks, you could use Enterprise Guide, for example, to orchestrate the tasks.
I'll ping some colleagues to chime in as well. Do you have a SAS rep or technical contact you are working with?