Talend: Why ‘healthy data’ in Snowflake matters, really
Partner news is rarely interesting.
For the most part, partner announcements roll out a contrived reel of mutual backslapping bonhomie designed to make both companies (or more) feel good about their corporate connection.
Brace yourself then.
Data integration and management company Talend has achieved ‘elite tier’ partner status with Snowflake, the company that likes to call itself the data cloud company.
If that wasn’t exciting enough, Talend has again been approved by Snowflake as a Snowflake Ready Technology Validation Partner, a glittering accolade that demonstrates how Talend adheres to Snowflake’s best practices around performance, reliability, and security.
But wait, as a refreshing diversion from the norm, Talend has explained what this alliance actually means to software application developers and data scientists. Keen to leave everyone feeling enlightened rather than corporate glossed, Andy Iyengar, manager for cloud ecosystems strategic alliances at Talend has explained the who, where, why and what of this union.
“The partnership builds on Talend’s Data Health Check for Snowflake (announced in 2021) which leverages Snowpark [a Snowflake technology – the Snowpark library provides an intuitive API for querying and processing data in a data pipeline) to immediately assess and improve data accuracy for the first time inside a Snowflake environment, providing healthy, analytics-ready data at scale to support business decision making,” said Iyengar, speaking to Computer Weekly’s Open Source Insider team this December 2022.
Check entire datasets
Iyengar explains that with a ‘simple’ click, Snowflake users are able to increase their performance and accuracy by running quality checks on entire datasets without the use of external applications or moving sample sets.
He says that it also addresses data privacy and sovereignty concerns by keeping processing inside Snowflake, so no data leaves the environment. By using Snowpark and Java UDF features, Talend runs, computes, and scales entirely natively within Snowflake, which reduces risks, complexity, and costs, and helps organizations meet compliance rules and regulations.
“Talend also makes intelligent recommendations regarding the transformations and quality rules the user can apply to increase the Trust Score for the dataset. With Talend and Snowflake, all data users can automate data access and sharing of healthy information they can trust. With Talend and Snowflake, organisations can rapidly drive their data transformation leveraging the flexibility, scalability, and connectivity of the solutions. Talend maximises Snowflake Data Cloud’s value by giving teams the ability to govern and share data, enable self-service analytics, and ease cloud and data modernization,” said Iyengar.
To maximise the value of Snowflake to assist its customers make better business decisions, Iyengar says it’s critical to build a cloud data platform that delivers the ability to provide internal teams automated data access and sharing of information they can trust.
“Talend complements the Snowflake architecture by assisting with the collection, governance, transformation and sharing of data that companies can trust. Talend is part of the Snowflake ecosystem and purpose-built to change the way the world makes business decisions — because every decision should start with data you can trust. Together, Talend and Snowflake build that confidence,” said Iyengar.
Talend Data Fabric makes it simple to collect data with hundreds of pre-built connectors for all types of systems, applications, and files, ensuring rapid ingestion into the Snowflake Data Cloud.
“As the data is collected, Talend applies machine learning to help categorise, profile and identify patterns. Then, Talend can deliver a Trust Score for the data to give the user a picture of that data’s health. This allows data professionals to instantly see the reliability of all their Snowflake data. With clear visualizations, users can measure the completeness, accessibility, and certification of their data. This begins the governance process for data consumers across the business,” clarified Talend’s Iyengar.
Talend also issued a press release using time-honoured terms such as ‘ongoing commitment’, ‘steady innovation’ and ‘greater business outcomes’, but now that we’ve had the real guts from Iyengar, we can (arguably) take most of that as read.
Mental Health happiness
Of note to finish, Mental Health Concern, a UK-based non-profit dedicated to providing free mental health services, is using Talend and Snowflake to deliver integrated, healthy data for decision-making. The organisation needed a single, scalable, reliable source of truth so it could evolve quickly without disruption. Mental Health Concern can now connect multiple systems and data sources so it can make reliable information more accessible and more trustworthy for stakeholders across the company.
Image: Talend