The archive

Latest articles

Reporting, explainers, and analysis on data and AI, updated continuously by the newsroom.

Matillion Context Engine grounds Maia agent work

Knowledge graphs for safer pipeline work: Matillion Context Engine, in public preview, gives Maia AI agents a metadata layer.

Data Today Matillion Desk · Jun 7, 2026

Matillion's Data Productivity Cloud, explained for builders

Matillion's Data Productivity Cloud builds and runs pipelines with low-code, code and AI. How the pieces fit and where the cost goes.

Data Today Matillion Desk · Jun 7, 2026

How long would it take to brute force your password with today's computing power?

A random 12-character password can outlast every computer on Earth, but an 8-character one on a weak hash falls in hours. Here is the brute-force math, mapped.

Data Today AI Desk · Jun 7, 2026

Building an AI agent on your Snowflake data with Cortex Agents

Cortex Agents let you build an AI agent that reasons across structured tables, unstructured documents, and custom tools inside Snowflake. It orchestrates a plan-act-reflect loop, and the bill is the sum of four meters you need to watch.

Data Today Snowflake Desk · Jun 7, 2026

Snowflake Cortex: running LLMs where your data already lives

Snowflake Cortex AI exposes LLMs as SQL functions like AI_COMPLETE and AI_CLASSIFY, so you run inference without moving data out. It is billed per token by model, and cost swings roughly 40x between a small model and a frontier one, so model choice is the budget.

Data Today Snowflake Desk · Jun 7, 2026

Cortex Analyst: let business users query Snowflake in plain English

Business users ask questions in plain English and get SQL answers with Cortex Analyst. Accuracy depends on your semantic view; billing is per message.

Data Today Snowflake Desk · Jun 7, 2026

Cortex Search: the managed RAG engine inside Snowflake

Snowflake's Cortex Search runs managed hybrid search for RAG without a vector database, but its several meters bill serving compute even when idle.

Data Today Snowflake Desk · Jun 7, 2026

Snowflake Gen2 warehouses: faster compute you have to opt into

Snowflake Gen2 standard warehouses run on faster hardware and finish most queries quicker, but they bill at a higher credit rate and you often have to switch with a SQL clause. Whether they save money depends entirely on whether the speedup beats the rate.

Data Today Snowflake Desk · Jun 7, 2026

Snowflake RBAC and masking: lock it down without grinding to a halt

Granting privileges to roles instead of users collapses thousands of Snowflake grants to a few hundred, and one masking policy protects many columns.

Data Today Snowflake Desk · Jun 7, 2026

Should you put your data lake in Snowflake Iceberg tables?

Snowflake Iceberg tables store data in open Apache Iceberg format in your own cloud storage, so Snowflake bills zero storage and other engines can read it. The catch: only Snowflake-managed catalog tables get full platform support, external-catalog tables lose clustering, cloning, and replication.

Data Today Snowflake Desk · Jun 7, 2026

Snowflake Openflow: managed ingestion built on Apache NiFi

Built on Apache NiFi, Snowflake Openflow moves data from any source into Snowflake, running inside Snowflake or in your own VPC, each billed differently.

Data Today Snowflake Desk · Jun 7, 2026

Snowflake clustering: when a clustering key actually pays off

Snowflake clustering keys reorganize micro-partitions so queries prune more of the table. On a well-clustered date column a one-day query can scan 140 micro-partitions instead of 9,800, but automatic clustering bills credits, so it only pays on big, filtered, slow-changing tables.

Data Today Snowflake Desk · Jun 7, 2026