Hybrid Tables Now Generally Available

Today we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Hybrid Tables in all AWS commercial regions. As part of Snowflake Unistore, Hybrid Tables unify both transactional and analytical workloads on a single database to simplify architectures as well as governance and security.  

Since launching the public preview of Hybrid Tables this year, we have seen adoption across industries from customers such as Siemens, Panther, Mutual of Omaha, PowerSchool, MarketWise and Project Lead The Way. These organizations and many more are using Hybrid Tables to simplify their data architectures and governance and security by consolidating transactional and analytical workloads onto Snowflake’s single unified data platform.  

Managing application state and metadata

Use Hybrid Tables as the system of record for application configuration, user profiles, workflow state and other metadata that needs to be accessed with high concurrency. Customers such as Siemens and PowerSchool are leveraging Hybrid Tables to track state for a wide variety of use cases.

“Siemens leverages Hybrid Tables in its Data Ingestion Engine to overcome concurrency challenges and improve data quality and consistency for its critical ERP replication process,” says Henrique Dias, Service Manager and Data Architect at Siemens AG. “With Unistore and Hybrid Tables, we can further scale and support our growing Snowflake-based Siemens Data and AI Cloud.”

The low-latency and high-concurrency capabilities of Hybrid Tables also power new customer experiences built directly on Snowflake. For example, PowerSchool, a leading provider of software for K-12 education, needs to deliver secure and efficient solutions that help its customers manage and analyze petabytes of data from disparate systems to maximize educational achievement.

“We are exploring the potential of Hybrid Tables to simplify workflows and meet high-concurrency, low-latency demands of PowerBuddy, our responsibly designed AI assistant,” says Shivani Stumpf, Chief Product and Innovation Officer at PowerSchool. “This innovation could allow our customers to engage with millions of parents and students with a transformative user experience.”

Serving data to applications with low latency

Build customized user experiences, dashboards and reports that quickly load precomputed data from Hybrid Tables into applications. With fast point lookups in Hybrid Tables, you no longer vneed to move data to a different database to power low-latency user experiences, which reduces complexity and speeds up development cycles.

Roofstock, a leading investment platform for single-family rentals, is seeing these benefits firsthand. “We are using Hybrid Tables as the backbone for our Data Services use cases,” says Ken Ostner, SVP of Data at Roofstock. “Snowflake’s Hybrid Tables allow us to simplify our data architecture, eliminating the need for data replication and eventual consistency in our environment, ultimately helping us speed up response times for end users and simplifying our analytics pipelines.”

Developing lightweight transactional applications

Open up new possibilities for developing applications on Snowflake with Hybrid Tables’ transactional capabilities. With low-latency point operations, powered by a new row-based storage engine, you can simplify application development by building on Snowflake’s cloud data platform. Apps built on Snowflake also gain the advantage of Snowflake’s unified data governance model, which helps maintain security and compliance for all your data. Mutual of Omaha leveraged these capabilities when creating its customer journey application for call center agents, consolidating transactional and analytical processing in Snowflake.

“Snowflake’s Hybrid Tables have accelerated our ability to manage marketing campaigns in real time, providing us the agility to process customer data and optimize marketing spend efficiently,” says Lorenzo Ball, Chief Data Officer at Mutual of Omaha. “By integrating transactional and analytical data, we’ve streamlined operations, eliminated data replication costs and boosted responsiveness to customer interactions. This technology empowers us to act swiftly with the insights we need, all while maintaining the security and scalability that Snowflake delivers.” 

What’s new in GA?

As part of making Hybrid Tables generally available, we have incorporated enhancements in the following key areas. 

  • Improved performance: Our testing shows a 50% reduction in p99 latencies and price performance for point operations.

  • Faster and more cost-efficient bulk loading: We’ve seen up to a 10x improvement in both bulk load speed and cost.

  • Larger capacity limits: 1 TB database sizes are the default, with larger sizes available upon request.

  • Enterprise features: Additions include continuous backup/restore with Time Travel to easily query older versions of your Hybrid Tables data. 

  • Improved monitoring experience: A grouped query history dashboard and additional query profile metrics for Hybrid Tables are also available.

Getting started: Tips and resources

Hybrid Tables are available today in Snowflake databases on AWS. You can start using them immediately — simply specify the HYBRID keyword when creating a new table: