Forem: Timothy Spann

All Data and AI Weekly #236-06-April-2026

Timothy Spann — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:25:33 +0000

All Data and AI Weekly #236-06April2026

( AI, Data, Agentic AI, Cortex Code, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

Tim's Corner: An Easter Basket Full of Data Goodness

Happy Easter and Happy Passover! Welcome to issue 236! Just like an Easter egg hunt, this week is packed with hidden treasures waiting to be discovered across the Snowflake ecosystem. The engineering team cracked open a must-read on why you need a semantic model, the Agentic Enterprise Control Plane vision continues to hatch new ideas, and Ontology on Snowflake went from architecture to deployment with a dedicated Cortex Code skill. On the platform side, CTAS support for Unity Catalog external volumes landed, Snowflake Directory Imports are here, and the Network Policy Advisor gives you a new egg-shaped lens on your security posture. Meanwhile, the community has been busy - guides on migrating Tableau to Streamlit with AI, building production-ready dbt projects with Cortex Code, and deploying Gemma 4 multimodal on SPCS. I've been building new SNACK-AI projects including an OSINT toolkit and SnowGhostBreakers Advanced. Spring is here - let's dig into the basket!

Tim's Content

Happy Passover and Easter.

Recent Presentations

Beyond the Prompt: Future of AI Data Cloud - March 2026 - Slide deck
24 March 2026 Demo Notes - NYC Snowflake Users Group hands-on demo

New SNACK-AI Repositories

Repository	Description
SNACKAI-CoCo-UnstructuredDemos	End-to-end demos for processing unstructured data with Cortex Code and SNACK-AI, including a dev ports example
SNACKAI-CoCo-BeyondthePrompt	Companion repository for the Beyond the Prompt presentation on the future of AI in the Data Cloud
SNACKAI-CoCo-Snowghost2	Ghost-busting application v2 built with Cortex Code on Snowflake
SNACKAI-CoCo-SnowGhostBreakers-Advanced	Advanced ghost-busting analytics with enhanced detection and investigation workflows
SNACKAI-Cortex-Code-Cheatsheet	Quick-reference cheatsheet for Cortex Code commands, skills, and workflows
SNACKAI-CoCo-OSINT	Open-source intelligence toolkit built with Cortex Code and SNACK-AI

Upcoming Events: Catch Tim Live!

April 7: Snowflake Connect: AI Data Cloud - Virtual
April 9: The Agentic Enterprise: From Strategy to ROI - Virtual
April 13-17: D4BV - Virtual APAC
April 14: D4BNA - Virtual US
April 15: Nodes AI Conference - Virtual
April 22: Snowflake Connect: Building Transformation Pipelines for AI-Ready Data - Virtual
April 29: Tysons Corner Hands-On Lab: Automate Data Workflows with Cortex Code and Evolv - Tysons Corner, VA
May 20: Budapest Data and AI - Budapest, Hungary - Tim Virtual speaking
June 2-5: Snowflake Summit 2026 - San Francisco, CA - Join me, I will be speaking on NiFi and Agents.

All Snowflake Events: https://www.snowflake.com/about/events/

Snowflake Summit 2026 - San Francisco, June 2-5

The biggest event of the year is coming! Snowflake Summit 2026 returns to San Francisco June 2-5. Expect keynotes, hands-on labs, deep technical sessions, partner showcases, and announcements that will shape the future of the data and AI ecosystem. Whether you're a data engineer, data scientist, architect, or business leader - this is the event to be at.

Register now: https://www.snowflake.com/summit/

Featured: Why You Need a Semantic Model

The Snowflake engineering blog published a foundational piece on why every data team needs a semantic model. As AI agents and natural language interfaces become the primary way users interact with data, semantic models become the essential bridge between raw schemas and business meaning - ensuring metrics are consistent, queries are correct, and governance is maintained.

Cortex AI & Agents

The Agentic Enterprise Control Plane

Snowflake's vision for the Agentic Enterprise Control Plane - a unified layer for orchestrating, governing, and monitoring AI agents across the enterprise. Agents operate within defined guardrails, coordinated by a central control plane built on trusted data.

Ontology on Snowflake: From Architecture to Deployment

A comprehensive guide on building operational ontologies in Snowflake - graph reasoning without a graph database. Define canonical entities, relationships, and constraints, then deploy them with a dedicated Cortex Code skill for automated ontology stack generation.

Resources:

Batch Cortex Search

Batch Cortex Search is now in public preview. The CORTEX_SEARCH_BATCH table function enables high-throughput offline search for entity resolution, deduplication, and clustering workloads.

Resources:

Cortex AI Services Cost Analyzer

Open-source tool for analyzing and visualizing costs across Cortex AI services - search, agents, analyst, and AI functions.

GitHub: https://github.com/alexfrancisross/cortex-ai-services-cost-analyzer

Agents Observe

Framework for observing and monitoring AI agent behavior, tool usage, and performance in production.

GitHub: https://github.com/simple10/agents-observe

Cortex Code: Skills, Subagents & Community

Supercharge Cortex Code CLI: Skills, Subagents, Hooks, and MCP

A practical guide covering the full extensibility surface of Cortex Code CLI - custom skills, subagent delegation, lifecycle hooks, and MCP server integration.

Build Custom Skills in Snowflake Cortex Code CLI

Step-by-step guide to creating custom skills that extend Cortex Code's capabilities for your team's specific workflows.

Demystifying Snowflake Cortex Code (CoCo)

Comprehensive overview of Cortex Code's architecture, capabilities, and how it fits into data engineering workflows.

Build a Production-Ready dbt Project Using Cortex Code CLI

End-to-end walkthrough of building a production-grade dbt project entirely driven by Cortex Code CLI.

Cortex Code DCM + dbt Demo

Demo project showcasing Database Change Management (DCM) and dbt workflows orchestrated by Cortex Code.

GitHub: https://github.com/errahulka/snowflake-coco-dcm-dbt-demo

Agentic Migration Workshop Skill

Cortex Code skill for guiding database migrations to Snowflake from Oracle, Teradata, Redshift, and SQL Server.

GitHub: https://github.com/Snowflake-Solutions/cortex-code-skills/tree/main/skills/agentic-migration-workshop

Claude Skill for Cortex Code

Community-built skill integrating Claude capabilities into Cortex Code workflows.

GitHub: https://github.com/sfc-gh-tjia/claude_skill_cortexcode

Build with CoCo

Collection of examples and patterns for building applications with Cortex Code.

GitHub: https://github.com/vinodhini-sd/build-with-coco

How Agentic Engineering Changed the Way I Build Streamlit Apps

Streamlit blog on how agentic AI workflows are transforming the Streamlit development experience.

Snowflake Platform Updates

CTAS Support for Unity Catalog External Volumes (Mar 31)

CREATE TABLE AS SELECT (CTAS) is now supported for Iceberg tables backed by Unity Catalog external volumes, simplifying table creation workflows in multi-engine lakehouse environments.

Snowflake Directory Imports

Snowflake now supports directory imports, allowing you to import an entire directory of files as a module in Python stored procedures and UDFs.

Network Policy Advisor

New Network Policy Advisor helps you understand your network access patterns and build effective network policies with data-driven recommendations.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/network-policy-advisor

RBAC Hardening Blueprint

Blueprint Manager template for hardening role-based access control (RBAC) configurations in Snowflake.

GitHub: https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/blueprint-manager/tree/main/blueprints/rbac-hardening

Semantic Views & Intelligence

Why You Need a Semantic Model

The engineering blog's deep dive into why semantic models are essential - bridging raw data and business meaning, powering consistent metrics, and enabling trustworthy natural language queries.

Snowflake-Trino SQL Translator

Open-source SQL translator for converting between Snowflake and Trino SQL dialects - useful for multi-engine lakehouse environments.

GitHub: https://github.com/Angel-Asensio/snowflake-trino-translator

Streamlit

Migrate Tableau to Streamlit in Minutes Using AI

Guide on using prompt-driven AI to migrate Tableau dashboards to Streamlit applications in minutes rather than weeks.

Apache Iceberg & Open Lakehouse

Apache Data Lakehouse Weekly (Mar 16 - Apr 2)

Alex Merced's roundup of the latest across the Apache data lakehouse ecosystem - Iceberg, Polaris, and open table format developments.

Data Sharing & Open Table Formats

Snowflake's vision for data sharing with open table formats enables seamless data exchange while maintaining interoperability across engines and platforms.

Machine Learning & AI Guides

Defect Detection Using Distributed PyTorch with Snowflake Notebooks

Build a defect detection model using distributed PyTorch training directly in Snowflake Notebooks - no external infrastructure needed.

Guide: https://www.snowflake.com/en/developers/guides/defect-detection-using-distributed-pytorch-with-snowflake-notebooks/

Getting Started with Snowpipe Streaming on AWS MSK

Step-by-step guide for setting up Snowpipe Streaming with Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK).

Guide: https://www.snowflake.com/en/developers/guides/getting-started-with-snowpipe-streaming-aws-msk/

Deploying Gemma 4 Multimodal on Snowflake SPCS

Deploy Gemma 4 multimodal model on Snowpark Container Services for text and image inference using llama.cpp.

Gemma 4 on Ollama

Gemma 4 is now available on Ollama for local inference.

Run it: https://ollama.com/library/gemma4

Validating a Data Platform Migration with an AI Coding Agent

Real-world account of using an AI coding agent to validate a data platform migration - covering test generation, assertion patterns, and confidence building.

dbt LLM Evals

Framework from Paradime for evaluating LLM-generated dbt models - measuring correctness, efficiency, and style compliance.

GitHub: https://github.com/paradime-io/dbt-llm-evals

Snowflake Labs Repositories

Repository	Description
unified-data-stack-for-incident-management	Reference architecture for building a unified incident management data stack on Snowflake
MCP-HOL-BUILD-2025	Hands-on lab for building MCP integrations with Snowflake
blueprint-manager (RBAC Hardening)	RBAC hardening blueprint for Snowflake security best practices
sfquickstarts: Batch Cortex Search	Setup SQL for the Batch Cortex Search quickstart

From the Community: Medium & Blogs

Article	Description
Ontology on Snowflake: Architecture to Deployment	End-to-end guide for building and deploying ontology stacks on Snowflake with Cortex Code
Operational Ontologies in Snowflake	Graph reasoning without a graph database using Snowflake's semantic and relational layers
Migrate Tableau to Streamlit in Minutes	Use prompt-driven AI to convert Tableau dashboards into Streamlit apps
Snowflake Supports Directory Imports	Import entire directories as Python modules in stored procedures and UDFs
Batch Cortex Search: Hybrid Search for High-Throughput Workloads	Engineering deep dive into the batch search architecture
Build a Production-Ready dbt Project with Cortex Code	End-to-end production dbt project driven by Cortex Code CLI
Build Custom Skills in Cortex Code CLI	Step-by-step custom skill creation guide
Demystifying Snowflake Cortex Code	Comprehensive CoCo architecture and capabilities overview
Deploying Gemma 4 Multimodal on Snowflake SPCS	Text and image inference with llama.cpp on Snowpark Container Services
How Agentic Engineering Changed the Way I Build Streamlit Apps	How agentic AI is transforming Streamlit development
Validating a Data Platform Migration with an AI Coding Agent	Using AI agents for migration validation and testing
Supercharge Cortex Code CLI: Skills, Subagents, Hooks, and MCP	Practical guide to the full CoCo extensibility surface

MCP & Agent Tooling

Tool	Description
Coalesce MCP	MCP integration for the Coalesce data transformation platform
Sidemantic	Semantic search MCP server for local document collections
MCP HOL Build (Snowflake Labs)	Hands-on lab for building MCP integrations with Snowflake
AutoSkills	Auto-generate AI agent skills from documentation and examples
METATRON	Meta-agent framework for orchestrating specialized AI agents

AI Research & Models

Gemma 4 Multimodal

Google's Gemma 4 multimodal model is now available - handling both text and image understanding. Run it locally via Ollama or deploy on Snowflake SPCS.

Ollama: https://ollama.com/library/gemma4
Snowflake SPCS Deployment Guide: https://adrianleexinhan.medium.com/deploying-gemma-4-multimodal-on-snowflake-text-and-image-inference-with-llama-cpp-and-spcs-76eec0a6d444

Athena Core

Open-source AI agent core from Athena AI Lab for building research and reasoning agents.

GitHub: https://github.com/Athena-AI-Lab/athena-core

A-Evolve

Self-evolving AI agent framework from A-EVO Lab that learns and adapts from its own execution history.

GitHub: https://github.com/A-EVO-Lab/a-evolve

OpenClaude

Open-source Claude-compatible interface for running and testing AI agent workflows.

GitHub: https://github.com/Gitlawb/openclaude

Duck Lineage

Data lineage tracking for DuckDB pipelines - visualize how data flows through your transformations.

GitHub: https://github.com/ilum-cloud/duck_lineage/

PaddleOCR

Baidu's state-of-the-art OCR toolkit supporting 80+ languages with high accuracy.

GitHub: https://github.com/PADDLEPADDLE/PADDLEOCR

Developer Tools

Browsers, Automation & Productivity

Tool	Description
Post4U	Schedule and automate social media posts across platforms
OwnScribe	Self-hosted writing and note-taking application
OpenScreen	Open-source screen sharing and recording tool
World Monitor CopilotKit	Global monitoring dashboard built with CopilotKit
Happier	Developer happiness and productivity toolkit
OfficeCLI	Command-line interface for office productivity tools
Ste.gg	Modern personal website and portfolio builder

Code, Icons & Design

Tool	Description
Developer Icons	Curated collection of developer and technology brand icons
FlipOff	CLI tool for quick file and project scaffolding

Documents, Media & Data

Tool	Description
Exifa	EXIF metadata analyzer and viewer for images
PDFx	PDF extraction and processing tool
Podcats	Podcast cataloging and management tool
Video Explainer	AI-powered video analysis and explanation tool
Call.md	Markdown-formatted call transcription and notes
GhGrab	GitHub repository downloader and archiver

Security & OSINT

Tool	Description
Checkov	Static analysis for infrastructure-as-code security scanning (Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, etc.)
QGIS OSINT	OSINT plugin for QGIS geographic information system

Chat & Communication

Tool	Description
Atomic Chat	AI-powered chat application with multi-model support
Strix	Lightweight messaging and communication framework
Mick	Conversational AI assistant framework
Frosty	AI chatbot built with Snowflake integration
Wardrowbe	AI-powered wardrobe management and outfit recommendation
Bluesky Bot Tutorial	Official AT Protocol guide for building Bluesky bots

Health & Awareness

Sytse Sijbrandij (GitLab co-founder) shares his cancer journey - an important read on health awareness for the tech community.

Read more: https://sytse.com/cancer/

ROI of Generative & Agentic AI

Snowflake published extensive research demonstrating the radical ROI organizations are seeing from generative and agentic AI implementations.

Resources:

Data Sharing & Open Table Formats

Snowflake's vision for data sharing with open table formats enables seamless data exchange while maintaining interoperability across engines and platforms.

SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern

As we look forward in 2026, SNACK-AI is the architectural pattern for powering AI applications at any scale - from mobile phones and robots to massive enterprise clusters.

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

Generated with Cortex Code for All Data and AI Weekly - April 6, 2026

All Data and AI Weekly #235-30March2026

Timothy Spann — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:29:48 +0000

All Data and AI Weekly #235-30March2026

( AI, Data, Agentic AI, Cortex Code, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

Tim's Corner: Cortex Code Everywhere

Welcome to issue 235! This week Snowflake made Cortex Code in Snowsight generally available and shipped native Windows CLI support, Agent Teams for multi-agent orchestration, and a wave of new agent skills. Batch Cortex Search entered public preview for high-throughput offline workloads, Agentic ML landed with Cortex Code for automating the full ML lifecycle, and the engineering team published a deep dive on solving the identifier mismatch problem in multi-engine lakehouses. On the community side, new guides cover dbt pipelines with Cortex Code, Snowflake Postgres migration via logical replication, and quantitative research with AI functions. I've been shipping new SNACK-AI projects all week - including an OSINT toolkit, a Cortex Code cheatsheet, and SnowGhostBreakers Advanced. Let's dive in!

Tim's Content

Recent Presentations

Beyond the Prompt: Future of AI Data Cloud - March 2026 - Slide deck
24 March 2026 Demo Notes - NYC Snowflake Users Group hands-on demo

New SNACK-AI Repositories

Repository	Description
SNACKAI-CoCo-UnstructuredDemos	End-to-end demos for processing unstructured data with Cortex Code and SNACK-AI, including a dev ports example
SNACKAI-CoCo-BeyondthePrompt	Companion repository for the Beyond the Prompt presentation on the future of AI in the Data Cloud
SNACKAI-CoCo-Snowghost2	Ghost-busting application v2 built with Cortex Code on Snowflake
SNACKAI-CoCo-SnowGhostBreakers-Advanced	Advanced ghost-busting analytics with enhanced detection and investigation workflows
SNACKAI-Cortex-Code-Cheatsheet	Quick-reference cheatsheet for Cortex Code commands, skills, and workflows
SNACKAI-CoCo-OSINT	Open-source intelligence toolkit built with Cortex Code and SNACK-AI

Upcoming Events: Catch Tim Live!

April 14: D4BNA - Virtual US
April 15: Nodes AI Conference - Virtual
April 13-17: D4BV - Virtual APAC
May 20: Budapest Data and AI - Budapest, Hungary - Tim Virtual speaking

All Snowflake Events: https://www.snowflake.com/about/events/

Featured: Cortex Code - Now More Widely Available and Ready for Bigger Tasks

Snowflake published a major update on Cortex Code this week with four key announcements: Cortex Code in Snowsight is now generally available, the CLI now supports native Windows environments, Agent Teams enable coordinated multi-agent orchestration for large tasks, and new agent skills standardize expert workflows for cost intelligence, ML, Streamlit, OpenFlow and more.

Key Highlights:

Persistent AI coding agent in Snowflake Workspaces and Notebooks
Agentic coding, discovery, administration and cost management in Snowsight
Agent Teams spin up parallel subagents with shared task lists and dependency management
New skills: cortex-code-guide, developing-with-streamlit, openflow, cost-intelligence, machine-learning, cortex-ai-functions

Cortex AI & Agents

The Agent Context Layer for Trustworthy Data Agents

Snowflake published a foundational blog on the Agent Context Layer - explaining why "talk to your data" is table stakes and why trustworthy agents need context spanning semantics, identity, constraints, policy and provenance. Internal experiments showed that augmenting agents with a plain-text data ontology improved accuracy by +20% and reduced tool calls by ~39%.

Agentic ML in Snowflake

Agentic ML through Cortex Code automates the path from data to predictive insights. Data science teams can build production-ready ML solutions from natural language prompts, with skills covering training, deployment, distributed training, hyperparameter tuning, and monitoring. First National Bank of Omaha reports 10x productivity gains.

Best Practices Guide: https://www.snowflake.com/en/developers/guides/agentic-machine-learning-best-practices-cortex-code/

Batch Cortex Search (Preview)

The CORTEX_SEARCH_BATCH table function is now in public preview. Submit batch queries to a Cortex Search service for offline use cases with high throughput requirements - entity resolution, deduplication, or clustering tasks. Batch search can also query services that are currently suspended.

Resources:

Cortex Code AI Function Studio Skill

New open-source skill for creating, evaluating, and optimizing custom AI functions using Snowflake Cortex AI Complete.

GitHub: https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/cortex-ai-function-studio-skill

Cortex Code Skills Library

Community-contributed skills library by Kelly Kohlleffel with reusable Cortex Code skills for common workflows.

GitHub: https://github.com/kellykohlleffel/cortex-code-skills

Apache Iceberg Updates

Solving Identifier Mismatch in Multi-Engine Lakehouses

A deep engineering dive into the identifier case sensitivity problem in multi-engine lakehouses. When Spark, Trino, Flink, and Snowflake share the same Iceberg catalog, identifier normalization conventions clash. Snowflake's solution: database-level CATALOG_CASE_SENSITIVITY configuration for catalog-linked databases, supporting both Hadoop-style (case-insensitive) and ANSI SQL-style (case-sensitive) conventions.

Apache Iceberg from Zero

New comprehensive guide from Snowflake Labs for getting started with Apache Iceberg from scratch.

GitHub: https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/apache-iceberg-from-zero

Snowflake Platform Updates

Release 10.10 (Mar 22-25)

Key updates in the latest Snowflake release:

Interval Data Types (Preview): New INTERVAL YEAR TO MONTH and INTERVAL DAY TO SECOND data types for duration calculations
Batch Cortex Search (Preview): High-throughput batch search via CORTEX_SEARCH_BATCH table function
Cortex Updates: See the full list of Cortex updates in the release notes

Full Release Notes: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes/2026/10_10

Dynamic Table SCHEDULER Attribute (GA - Mar 26)

New SCHEDULER attribute for dynamic tables lets you control whether automatic refresh is enabled or disabled. When SCHEDULER = DISABLE, the table can only be refreshed manually with ALTER DYNAMIC TABLE ... REFRESH - critical for external orchestrators like dbt that need to manage individual refreshes without triggering the entire pipeline.

Block Public Stage Access with IP Exceptions (GA - Mar 20)

Block public access to Azure internal stages while maintaining an allowlist of permitted IP addresses or CIDR blocks via SYSTEM$BLOCK_INTERNAL_STAGES_PUBLIC_ACCESS_WITH_EXCEPTION.

DML Error Logging for Tables

Configure DML error logging for data load operations, capturing failed rows for investigation instead of failing the entire load.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/data-load-overview#configure-dml-error-logging-for-a-table

ANOMALY_INSIGHTS: Get Hourly Consumption by Service Type

New method for the ANOMALY_INSIGHTS class providing hourly consumption metrics broken down by service type.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/classes/anomaly-insights/methods/get_hourly_consumption_by_service_type

Snowflake Notebooks in Workspaces

Updated documentation for Notebooks in Workspaces - collaborative, interactive notebooks with container runtime for AI/ML production workflows.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/ui-snowsight/notebooks-in-workspaces/notebooks-in-workspaces-overview

Notebook Project Objects (NPO): Run Python Scripts in Snowflake

A new schema-level object type that lets you deploy and run Python scripts non-interactively on a warehouse or compute pool. Write and test locally, deploy as a Notebook Project Object, then run on-demand or schedule with a Task. Supports CI/CD via Snowflake CLI.

Resources:

OpenFlow Updates

OpenFlow Connector for SQL Server

The OpenFlow Connector for SQL Server replicates data from SQL Server databases to Snowflake in near real-time or on schedule using SQL Server Change Tracking. Supports SQL Server 2016-2022, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, AWS RDS, and Google Cloud SQL.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/data-integration/openflow/connectors/sql-server/about

From the Community: Medium & Blogs

Article	Description
Building dbt Pipelines with Snowflake Cortex Code	Hands-on guide to building dbt pipelines using Cortex Code as your AI pair programmer
How to Build a Governed Metric Registry on Snowflake	Building trusted KPIs for humans and AI with a governed metric registry
Open Trust Center Severities in Your Organization	Snowflake SQL guide for querying Trust Center severity findings across your organization
What is Cortex Code and Why Does It Matter?	phData's overview of Cortex Code's capabilities and impact on data engineering workflows
The Data Engineer's Cortex Code Cheat Sheet	Quick-reference cheat sheet for data engineers getting started with Cortex Code
Building an MCP Ecosystem at Pinterest	How Pinterest built an enterprise MCP ecosystem for AI agent integrations
Spartera + Snowflake Partnership	New technology partnership announcement between Spartera and Snowflake

Quickstarts & Guides

Guide	Description
Quantitative Research with AI Functions and Cortex Code	Build quantitative research workflows using Cortex AI functions and Cortex Code
Build Real-Time Fraud Detection Model with Natural Language	Build a fraud detection model using natural language prompts in Snowflake ML
Supply Chain Assistant with Snowflake Intelligence	Build a supply chain assistant powered by Snowflake Intelligence
Intro to Feature Store	Getting started with Snowflake's Feature Store for ML workflows
Migrate to Snowflake Postgres Using Logical Replication	Migration guide for moving PostgreSQL workloads to Snowflake Postgres
Powering AI-Ready Data Products with HL7 Data	Unpack complex HL7 healthcare data into AI-ready data products
Neo4j Fraud Detection on Snowflake	Graph-powered fraud detection with Neo4j and Snowflake
Neo4j Manufacturing on Snowflake	Graph analytics for manufacturing use cases with Neo4j and Snowflake
Neo4j Subways on Snowflake	Subway route analysis with Neo4j graph analytics on Snowflake
Route Optimisation & Vehicle Route Plan Simulator	Build a route optimization and vehicle route planning simulator
Cortex Code Cookbook: SiS Dashboard Deploy	Cookbook recipe for deploying Streamlit in Snowflake dashboards with Cortex Code
dbt + CoCo Demo	Demo project showing dbt development with Cortex Code

GitHub: Snowflake Labs

Repository	Description
apache-iceberg-from-zero	Comprehensive guide to getting started with Apache Iceberg on Snowflake
snowflake_dcm_projects	Database Change Management project examples and templates
cortex-ai-function-studio-skill	Cortex Code skill for building and evaluating custom AI functions
blueprint-manager	Blueprint management tool for Snowflake project templates
sfguide-powering-AI-Ready-Data-Products-by-unpacking-complex-HL7-data	Companion code for the HL7 healthcare data guide
postgres-full-day-training	Full-day training materials for Snowflake Postgres

Snowflake Postgres

Full-Day Training

Comprehensive training materials for getting started and going deep with Snowflake Postgres.

GitHub: https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/postgres-full-day-training

BlueBox

Open-source toolkit for Snowflake Postgres workflows and utilities.

GitHub: https://github.com/ryanbooz/bluebox

Data Trends & Resources

Data Trends 2026: Financial Services

Snowflake's report on key data and AI trends shaping the financial services industry in 2026.

AI Futures Model

Interactive resource exploring trajectories and scenarios for AI development.

Read more: https://www.aifuturesmodel.com/

How to Enable Tracing and Logging in Power BI Desktop

Community guide for configuring tracing and logging in Microsoft Power BI Desktop with Snowflake connections.

Security

How to Secure Agentic AI: Agent Identity Protocol (AIP)

All Things Open article on securing agentic AI with the Agent Identity Protocol - a framework for establishing trust and identity for AI agents.

Go Implementation: https://github.com/openagentidentityprotocol/aip-go

TeamPCP Supply Chain Attack on LiteLLM

Wiz research on the TeamPCP campaign trojanizing LiteLLM - critical reading for anyone running open-source AI inference proxies.

MCP & Agent Tooling

Tool	Description
Agent Browser (Vercel Labs)	Browser automation framework designed for AI agents from Vercel Labs
Agent Skill Creator	Framework for creating reusable skills for AI agents
x1xhlol/system-prompts-and-models-of-ai-tools	Collection of system prompts and model configurations from various AI tools

AI Research & Models

Cohere Transcribe

Cohere Transcribe 03-2026 - new speech-to-text model from Cohere Labs.

HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026

MolmoWeb by Allen AI

MolmoWeb - multimodal language model interface from the Allen Institute for AI.

Read more: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoweb

Deer Flow by ByteDance

Deer Flow - agent workflow framework from ByteDance for building complex multi-step AI applications.

GitHub: https://github.com/bytedance/deer-flow

Meetily

Open-source AI meeting assistant for transcription, summarization, and action items.

GitHub: https://github.com/Zackriya-Solutions/meetily

Developer Tools

Terminal & Shell

Tool	Description
lnav	Advanced log file navigator for the terminal
cliamp	CLI audio/media player

Data Visualization & Infrastructure

Tool	Description
Terravision	Automated infrastructure visualization from Terraform files
MiniStack	Minimal cloud infrastructure stack for development

Documents & Screenshots

Tool	Description
ProofShot	Screenshot verification and proof-of-work tool
RevPDF	PDF reverse engineering and extraction tool

Frameworks & Libraries

Tool	Description
Yggdrasil	Event sourcing and CQRS framework
Keploy	API testing platform that auto-generates test cases from API calls
VoidLLM	Lightweight LLM inference engine

ROI of Generative & Agentic AI

Snowflake published extensive research demonstrating the radical ROI organizations are seeing from generative and agentic AI implementations.

Resources:

Data Sharing & Open Table Formats

Snowflake's vision for data sharing with open table formats enables seamless data exchange while maintaining interoperability across engines and platforms.

SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern

As we look forward in 2026, SNACK-AI is the architectural pattern for powering AI applications at any scale - from mobile phones and robots to massive enterprise clusters.

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

Generated with Cortex Code for All Data and AI Weekly - March 30, 2026

All Data and AI Weekly #234 - 23 March 2026

Timothy Spann — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 20:18:18 +0000

All Data and AI Weekly #234 - 23 March 2026

( AI, Data, Agentic AI, Cortex Code, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

The Agentic Enterprise Takes Shape

Welcome to issue 234! This is a landmark week for the Snowflake ecosystem. Snowflake officially unveiled Cortex Code to the world with a major press release, the Agentic Enterprise Control Plane vision dropped, Cortex Agent Evaluations are now documented, and DCM Projects bring infrastructure-as-code to Snowflake. On the Iceberg front, bidirectional interoperability with Horizon Catalog is here, plus Azure Data Lake Storage support for external volumes. I've been shipping new SNACK-AI projects all week - including a Situation Desk, OpenFlow Python Processors, and a DJ app built entirely in Cortex Code. Tomorrow I'll be at the NYC Snowflake Users Group for a hands-on workshop. Let's dive in!

New SNACK-AI Repositories

Repository	Description
SNACKAI-CoCo-situation-desk	A real-time situation awareness desk built with SNACK-AI and Cortex Code, providing unified monitoring dashboards for streaming data events, alerts, and operational intelligence
SNACKAI-OpenFlow-Python-Processors	Custom Python processors for Snowflake OpenFlow, enabling data transformation, enrichment, and routing logic within OpenFlow pipelines using Python
SNACKAI-CoCo-Quick	Quick-start templates and utilities for bootstrapping SNACK-AI projects with Cortex Code, get up and running fast
Semantic Layer Quality Scoring Framework	A comprehensive framework for scoring and evaluating the quality of your Snowflake semantic layer - covering completeness, consistency, and accuracy metrics
SNACKAI-CoCo-DJ-Snowflake	A DJ and music application built entirely with Cortex Code on Snowflake, showcasing creative AI-powered app development
SNACKAI-CoCo-MarkdownBrowser	A markdown-based browser built with Cortex Code, enabling rich document rendering and navigation within the SNACK-AI ecosystem

Video

SNACK-AI Demo Walkthrough - Tim walks through the latest SNACK-AI architecture and demos

Upcoming Events: Catch Tim Live!

March 24: NYC Snowflake Users Group - NYC Hands on Workshop
April 14: D4BNA - Virtual US
April 15: Nodes AI Conference - Virtual
April 13-17: D4BV - Virtual APAC
May 20: Budapest Data and AI - Budapest, Hungary - Tim Virtual speaking

All Snowflake Events: https://www.snowflake.com/about/events/

Snowflake Virtual Hands-On Labs

Get hands-on with Snowflake in these upcoming free workshops:

Date	Lab	Link
Mar 18	Agent to OpenFlow: End-to-End Unstructured Data Insights	Register
Mar 18	Zero to Snowflake in 90 Minutes	Register
Mar 24	From Prompt to Production: Real-Time Fraud Detection	Register
Mar 25	Build Faster with Cortex Code AI	Register
Mar 25	Getting Started with Snowpark on Iceberg	Register
Apr 1	Cortex Code: Your AI Coding Assistant in Snowsight	Register

Browse all labs: https://www.snowflake.com/en/webinars/virtual-hands-on-lab/?tags=region%2Famericas&page=1&pageSize=6&offset=6

Major Announcement: Snowflake Unveils Cortex Code

Snowflake officially announced Cortex Code - an AI coding agent that drastically increases developer productivity by understanding your enterprise data context. This is a major milestone: an AI assistant that doesn't just write code, but understands your Snowflake environment, your data, your semantic layers, and your governance policies.

Key Highlights:

AI coding agent native to Snowflake
Deep understanding of enterprise data context
Integrated with Snowsight and CLI
Custom skills and extensibility support
Governance-aware code generation

Press Release: https://www.snowflake.com/en/news/press-releases/snowflake-unveils-cortex-code-an-ai-coding-agent-that-drastically-increases-productivity-by-understanding-your-enterprise-data-context/

Featured: The Agentic Enterprise Control Plane

Snowflake published a vision piece on the Agentic Enterprise Control Plane - a unified layer for orchestrating, governing, and monitoring AI agents across the enterprise. This is where enterprise AI is heading: agents that operate within defined guardrails, coordinated by a central control plane built on trusted data.

Key Concepts:

Centralized agent orchestration
Policy-driven governance for AI agents
Observability and audit trails
Integration with existing data infrastructure

Cortex AI & Agents

Cortex Agent Evaluations

The Snowflake engineering team published a comprehensive guide on evaluating Cortex Agents - covering metrics, benchmarks, and systematic approaches to measuring agent reliability and accuracy. Critical reading for anyone deploying agents in production.

Resources:

Cortex Code Governance Skills

New engineering blog on building governance-aware skills for Cortex Code. These skills understand your data policies, masking rules, and access controls, ensuring AI-generated code respects your security posture.

Cortex Code in Snowsight (Preview - Mar 12)

Cortex Code AI Suggestions are now available in Preview directly within Snowsight, bringing intelligent code completion and AI assistance to the web IDE.

Documentation:

Cortex Agents Documentation

Updated comprehensive documentation for building, deploying, and managing Cortex Agents.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/snowflake-cortex/cortex-agents

Snowflake Intelligence Artifacts (Mar 19)

New Artifacts feature for Snowflake Intelligence allows agents to produce, store, and reference structured outputs like reports, charts, and data summaries.

Documentation:

Classification ML Function - Predict Method

Updated documentation for the Classification predict method, with new examples for applying trained classification models to new data.

Documentation:

Cortex Code Best Practices

The definitive guide to getting the most out of Cortex Code CLI - covering data exploration, code generation, skill development, and workflow optimization.

Apache Iceberg Updates

Bidirectional Interoperability with Horizon Catalog

Major engineering blog on bidirectional interoperability between Apache Iceberg and the Snowflake Horizon Catalog. Read and write Iceberg tables from Snowflake while external engines (Spark, Trino, etc.) simultaneously access the same data.

External Query Engine with Horizon Writes (Mar 16)

New feature allowing external query engines to write to Iceberg tables managed by Snowflake Horizon.

Azure Data Lake Storage External Volumes (Mar 20)

Support for Azure Data Lake Storage as external volumes for Iceberg tables, expanding multi-cloud options.

Documentation:

DCM Projects: Infrastructure-as-Code for Snowflake

Database Change Management (DCM) Projects bring declarative, version-controlled infrastructure management to Snowflake. Define your databases, schemas, tables, and roles in code and deploy them reproducibly.

Key Features:

Declarative resource definitions
Version-controlled database changes
Reproducible deployments
CI/CD integration

Documentation:

Snowflake Platform Updates

Release 10.9 - TSS History View (GA)

The TSS_HISTORY account usage view is now Generally Available, providing historical data on Tri-Secret Secure configurations.

OpenFlow BigQuery Connector (Preview - Mar 17)

The OpenFlow connector for BigQuery enters Public Preview, enabling CDC from Google BigQuery into Snowflake.

User-Defined Data Types

New support for user-defined data types in Snowflake SQL, enabling custom type definitions for stronger data modeling.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/data-types-user-defined

Listing Access History

New listing access history view for tracking who accessed shared data listings and when.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/data-sharing-usage/listing-access-history

Listings BCDR

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery documentation for Snowflake Marketplace listings.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/collaboration/listings-bcdr

Alerts UI (Limited Access)

New Alerts UI for managing and monitoring Snowflake alerts visually.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/LIMITEDACCESS/alerts-ui

Snowflake Notebooks

Updated product page for Snowflake Notebooks - collaborative, interactive notebooks natively in Snowflake.

Snowflake Postgres High Availability

Documentation on high availability for Snowflake Postgres deployments.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/snowflake-postgres/high-availability

Project Snowwork: AI for Business Users

Project Snowwork aims to bring AI capabilities directly to business users - no coding required. Build intelligent workflows, automate routine tasks, and get AI-powered insights from natural language.

Snowflake Open Source

Arctic Training

Open-source training framework for Arctic language models from Snowflake.

GitHub: https://github.com/snowflakedb/ArcticTraining

Arctic Inference

Optimized inference engine for Arctic models with high-throughput serving.

GitHub: https://github.com/snowflakedb/ArcticInference

Snowflake Telemetry Python

Python SDK for Snowflake telemetry - instrument your applications with traces and metrics.

GitHub: https://github.com/snowflakedb/snowflake-telemetry-python

SSv2 AI Webinar

End-to-end demo for Snowpipe Streaming V2 with AI, including live dashboards and Cortex Agent integration.

GitHub: https://github.com/sfc-gh-chathomas/SSv2-AI-Webinar

CoCo Skills Library

Community-contributed Cortex Code skills library with reusable skills for common workflows.

GitHub: https://github.com/vinodhini-sd/coco-skills-library

From the Community: Medium & Blogs

Deep Technical Looks at Cortex Code

Article	Author	Description
A Deep Technical Look at Cortex Code from a Snowflake Architect's Perspective	Cadarsh Hegde	Comprehensive architectural analysis of Cortex Code internals, extensibility model, and integration patterns from an architect's viewpoint
Meet Your New Teammate: A Deep Dive into Snowflake Cortex Code	Abhishek Mittal	Getting started guide exploring Cortex Code as an AI pair programmer for Snowflake development
Cortex Code Decoded: Teach Your Agent New Tricks with Custom Skills	Maseed Ilyas	Step-by-step tutorial on building custom skills to extend Cortex Code capabilities

Architecture & Strategy

Article	Author	Description
From Self-Service BI to Autonomous Intelligence	Snowflake	Architectural blueprint for evolving from traditional BI to autonomous, AI-driven intelligence platforms
Architecting Multi-Agent Workflows with Snowflake Cortex	Snowflake	Design patterns for orchestrating multiple AI agents in Cortex, covering coordination, state management, and error handling
From Legacy BI to an Intelligence Layer	Snowflake	Lessons learned from Snowflake's own BI migration journey to an AI-powered intelligence layer

External Blogs

Article	Description
NanoCortex Blueprint: Snowflake Cortex Agents	Minimal, clean blueprint for building Cortex Agents with a focus on simplicity and reproducibility
Snowflake Cortex Proxy for AI Coding Agents	How to set up a Cortex inference proxy so external AI coding agents can use Snowflake's LLM endpoints
Markdown as Agentic UI	Using markdown as a universal interface for building agentic user experiences
Agent-Native Design	Guide to designing applications that are built from the ground up for AI agent interaction
How Booking.com Uses AI and Data	How Booking.com creates connected customer trip experiences using AI and data at scale

Semantic Views: Why We Need Them

The Snowflake engineering blog published a foundational article on why semantic views matter - bridging the gap between raw data and business meaning, enabling consistent metrics across tools, and powering natural language queries.

dbt Labs Updates

ADE-Bench: Data Engineering Benchmarking

The Analytics Data Engineering Benchmark (ADE-Bench) from dbt Labs provides standardized benchmarks for evaluating AI-assisted data engineering. Measures how well AI agents can write correct, efficient dbt models.

Resources:

Videos

Title	Description	Link
SNACK-AI Demo Walkthrough	Tim walks through the latest SNACK-AI architecture	Watch
Cortex Agent Evaluations	Deep dive into evaluating Cortex Agents	Watch
Snowflake AI & Data Engineering	Snowflake AI workflows and data pipelines	Watch
Building with Cortex Code	Hands-on Cortex Code development session	Watch
Agentic AI Patterns	Patterns for building AI agent systems	Watch
Data Pipeline Architecture	Modern data pipeline design	Watch
Snowflake Intelligence Deep Dive	End-to-end Snowflake Intelligence walkthrough	Watch
SNACK-AI Architecture	SNACK-AI architectural patterns explained	Watch
Cortex Code Skills	Building custom skills for Cortex Code	Watch
Real-Time Data with OpenFlow	OpenFlow for real-time ingestion	Watch
Iceberg on Snowflake	Apache Iceberg integration patterns	Watch

MCP & Agent Tooling

Tool	Description
Snowflake Cortex Inference Proxy	Proxy server that lets external AI coding agents use Snowflake Cortex LLM endpoints with policy controls and prompt management
MCP-MAT	MCP management and testing toolkit for developing and debugging MCP integrations
Meshtastic MCP	MCP server for Meshtastic mesh networking devices, enabling AI agents to communicate over LoRa
Coalesce MCP	MCP integration for Coalesce data transformation platform
iMCP	iOS/macOS MCP client for running Model Context Protocol servers on Apple devices
Ask Search	MCP-compatible search tool for AI agent web search

AI Research & Models

LumberChunker: Document Segmentation

Carnegie Mellon published research on LumberChunker - an intelligent approach to segmenting long-form narrative documents for RAG pipelines. Beats naive chunking strategies significantly.

Mistral Small 4

Mistral Small 4 released - the latest compact model from Mistral AI with improved reasoning and instruction following.

MiniMax M2.7

MiniMax M2.7 is now available on Ollama - a compact but capable model for local inference.

Run it: https://ollama.com/library/minimax-m2.7

Open SWE by LangChain

Open SWE from LangChain - an open-source software engineering agent framework for autonomous code editing and debugging.

GitHub: https://github.com/langchain-ai/open-swe

AutoResearchClaw

AI-powered automated research assistant that can search, read, and synthesize academic papers.

GitHub: https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw

Agent Safehouse

Secure sandbox environment for testing and developing AI agents without risk to production systems.

Website: https://agent-safehouse.dev/

DiMOS

Dimensional OS - an operating system abstraction for building multi-modal AI agent systems.

GitHub: https://github.com/dimensionalOS/dimos

Developer Tools

Browsers, Crawlers & Headless

Tool	Description
Lightpanda Browser	Lightweight, fast headless browser purpose-built for AI agents and web automation
HeadlessX	Advanced headless browser automation framework for scraping and testing
SiteFetch	Turn any website into LLM-ready text with a single command

Terminal & Shell

Tool	Description
Ghostty	Fast, feature-rich terminal emulator built for modern workflows
NVIDIA OpenShell	NVIDIA's open-source shell environment for GPU-accelerated workflows
Open Terminal	Terminal emulator from the Open WebUI team, designed for AI-powered interactions
Tmux Guide	Comprehensive visual guide to tmux terminal multiplexer
MPP.dev	Modern process and project management from the terminal

Code, Search & Productivity

Tool	Description
TinyCode	Minimal, fast code editor for quick edits
QMD	Quick markdown processing and rendering utilities
Kanban Todo	Simple kanban board in the terminal for task management
OpenCode	Open-source AI coding assistant
Goal-MD	Goal-oriented markdown for structured project planning

Audio & Voice

Tool	Description
NeuTTS	Neural text-to-speech engine with natural voice synthesis
Audiblez	Convert text documents into audiobooks with AI voices
VoiceTag	Voice-based tagging and annotation system
KittenTTS	Lightweight text-to-speech library

PDF & Documents

Tool	Description
TinyPDF	Lightweight, fast PDF processing library

Networking & Infrastructure

Tool	Description
Rustunnel	Fast, secure tunneling written in Rust
Project Nomad	Self-hosted infrastructure and networking toolkit
Cockpit	Web-based server management interface
Mailrise	SMTP gateway for push notifications
Apprise	Universal push notification library supporting 100+ services

Security & OSINT

Tool	Description
Sn1per	Automated penetration testing reconnaissance scanner
Awesome OSINT for Everything	Curated collection of OSINT tools and resources
Shadow Fleet Tracker	Open-source maritime vessel tracking and analysis
RedGridLink	Tactical communication and coordination tool

Data & Search

Tool	Description
Sonar	Semantic search engine for local documents
Hacker News Dataset	Complete Hacker News dataset on HuggingFace for analysis and training
Brave Search API	Privacy-respecting search API for building AI applications
PURL.dev	Package URL specification for universal software package identification

Design

Tool	Description
Stitch Design MD	Google's markdown-based design system documentation framework

ROI of Generative & Agentic AI

Snowflake published extensive research demonstrating the radical ROI organizations are seeing from generative and agentic AI implementations.

Resources:

Data Sharing & Open Table Formats

Snowflake's vision for data sharing with open table formats enables seamless data exchange while maintaining interoperability across engines and platforms.

SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern

As we look forward in 2026, SNACK-AI is the architectural pattern for powering AI applications at any scale - from mobile phones and robots to massive enterprise clusters.

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

Generated with Cortex Code for All Data and AI Weekly - March 23, 2026

All Data and AI Weekly #233-16March2026

Timothy Spann — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:13:32 +0000

All Data and AI Weekly #233-16March2026

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

Tim's Corner: Conferences and Custom Skills

What a week! I had the pleasure of speaking at both MCP Conference NYC and LLM Day over the past two weeks. The energy around agentic AI and Model Context Protocol is incredible - developers are building amazing things with Cortex Code custom skills and MCP integrations. This week we're diving deep into catalog-linked databases, multi-location resilience, and the explosion of tools for building AI agents. Let's go!

Tim's Content

Recent Presentations

MCP Conference NYC (March 11) - Gilberto and I presented on building agentic AI applications with real-time data pipelines.

I also spoke at LLM Day NYC the previous week on stateful AI agents in Snowflake.

New Repositories

Repository	Description
dbtprojectsexample	Example dbt projects for Snowflake
SNACKAI-CoCo-DBT-MTAPipeline	SNACK-AI pipeline with Cortex Code and dbt integration
SNACKAI-CoCo-Meshtastic Dashboard	Meshtastic IoT dashboard with SNACK-AI

Upcoming Events: Catch Tim Live!

March 18: Data for Breakfast Princeton - Princeton
March 19: Warsaw IT Days - Virtual
March 24: NYC Snowflake Users Group - NYC Hands on Workshop
April 14: D4BNA - Virtual US
April 15: Nodes AI Conference - Virtual
April 13-17: D4BV - Virtual APAC
May 20: Budapest Data and AI - Budapest, Hungary - Tim Virtual speaking

All Snowflake Events: https://www.snowflake.com/about/events/

Featured: Catalog-Linked Databases with Cortex Code CLI

The Snowflake engineering team published a comprehensive guide on using Catalog-Linked Databases with the Cortex Code CLI for Apache Iceberg workflows. This enables seamless integration between external Iceberg catalogs and Snowflake's AI capabilities.

Key Capabilities:

Connect to external Iceberg catalogs (AWS Glue, Polaris, etc.)
Query Iceberg tables directly from Cortex Code
Build AI pipelines on open table formats
Maintain full interoperability with other query engines

Snowflake Platform Updates

Release 10.9 Highlights

The latest Snowflake 10.9 release brings numerous improvements across the platform.

Release Notes: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes/2026/10_9

Multi-Location Resilience for Data Pipelines (GA - Mar 12)

Multi-location resilience for data pipelines is now Generally Available, enabling automatic failover and high availability for mission-critical data workflows.

Documentation:

Recent Cortex Search Improvements (Mar 12)

New enhancements to Cortex Search including improved relevance ranking and expanded document support.

Cortex AI & Agents

From Zero to Agents Guide

Comprehensive quickstart guide for building AI agents from scratch with Snowflake Cortex.

Resources:

Cortex Agents Resource Budgets

New documentation on setting resource budgets for Cortex Agents to control costs and manage compute allocation.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/snowflake-cortex/cortex-agents-resource-budgets

Managing Cortex Agents

Updated guide on modifying and managing deployed Cortex Agents.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/snowflake-cortex/cortex-agents-manage#label-snowflake-agents-modify-agents

Cortex Code Custom Skills

Deep dive into building custom skills for Cortex Code extensibility.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cortex-code/extensibility#extensibility-skills

Dash Cortex Code Skills

Dashboard and examples for Cortex Code Skills development.

GitHub: https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/dash-cortex-code-skills

ROI of Generative & Agentic AI

Snowflake published extensive research on the ROI of generative and agentic AI implementations, showing radical returns for organizations embracing AI-native architectures.

Resources:

Semantic Views & Intelligence

Why We Need Semantic Views

Engineering deep dive explaining the rationale behind Semantic Views and how they bridge the gap between raw data and business understanding.

Semantic Views for Power BI

Integration guide for using Snowflake Semantic Views with Power BI for consistent business metrics across BI tools.

GitHub: https://github.com/alexfrancisross/snowflake-semantic-views-powerbi

Snowflake Intelligence for Manufacturers

How manufacturers are leveraging Snowflake Intelligence for actionable data insights across their operations.

From the Community: Medium & Blogs

Article	Author	Description
Spec-Driven Development in Snowflake Cortex Code	Snowflake	Applying SDLC rigor to AI-assisted workflows
Snowflake is Cheaper & Faster Than Databricks Serverless	Nick Akincilar	Real-world cost and performance comparison
From Self-Service BI to Autonomous Intelligence	Snowflake	Architecting next-gen data platforms
Playing with Snowflake Managed MCP	Snowflake	Hands-on guide to managed MCP services
Cortex Code Decoded: Custom Skills	Maseed Ilyas	Teaching your agent new tricks with custom skills

Data Sharing & Open Table Formats

Snowflake's vision for data sharing with open table formats - enabling seamless data exchange while maintaining openness and interoperability.

Quickstarts & Guides

Agentic AI for Asset Management

Build AI agents for quantitative asset management workflows with Snowflake.

GitHub: https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/sfguide-agentic-ai-for-asset-management

Quantitative Research with AI Functions

Guide to using AI Functions and Cortex Code for quantitative research workflows.

OpenRouteService Native App

Deploy OpenRouteService as a Snowflake Native App for geospatial routing.

Guide: https://www.snowflake.com/en/developers/guides/oss-install-openrouteservice-native-app/

Customer Support Intelligence with AI

Build intelligent customer support systems using Snowflake AI capabilities.

GitHub: https://github.com/ootejreddy/Customer_Support_Intelligence_Using_AI/tree/dev

Ontology on Snowflake

Framework for building ontology-based data models on Snowflake.

GitHub: https://github.com/sfc-gh-tjia/ontology-on-snowflake/

Flux Utility Solutions

Utility solutions for Flux workflows on Snowflake.

GitHub: https://github.com/sfc-gh-abannerjee/flux-utility-solutions

Claude & AI Tools

Claude 1M Context (GA)

Anthropic announced 1 million token context window is now generally available for Claude, enabling massive document processing.

Chrome DevTools MCP

Debug your browser sessions with MCP integration in Chrome DevTools.

Claude Code Tool Manager

Manage and organize tools for Claude Code workflows.

GitHub: https://github.com/tylergraydev/claude-code-tool-manager

Claude Codex Settings

Configuration and settings manager for Claude Codex.

GitHub: https://github.com/fcakyon/claude-codex-settings

Agent & MCP Tools

Tool	Description
Agent Safehouse	Secure environment for AI agent development and testing
Agency Agents	Framework for building multi-agent systems
Understudy AI	AI assistant training and deployment platform
PyCoClaw	Python toolkit for AI agent development

Developer Tools

Browsers & Scraping

Tool	Description
Lightpanda Browser	Lightweight headless browser for AI agents
Firecrawl	Turn websites into LLM-ready markdown

Code & Search

Tool	Description
TinyCode	Minimal code editor
Greppy	Enhanced grep for code search
Goal-MD	Goal-oriented markdown for project planning
QMD	Quick markdown utilities

PDF & Documents

Tool	Description
TinyPDF	Lightweight PDF processing library

Voice & Audio

Tool	Description
NeuTTS	Neural text-to-speech synthesis

Security & Privacy

Tool	Description
Yopass	Secure secret sharing
OpenClaw	Open-source security tools
Shadowbroker	Security research tools

Git & Version Control

Tool	Description
Git Truck	Visualize git repository structure

Hardware & IoT

Tool	Description
Bjorn	IoT device management

IDE Extensions

Duck Code Pro

AI-powered coding assistant for VS Code.

Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Duckcode.duck-code-pro

Industry Spotlight

Booking.com AI & Data Strategy

How Booking.com uses AI and data to create connected trip experiences for customers.

SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern

As we look forward in 2026, SNACK-AI is the architectural pattern for powering AI applications at any scale - from mobile phones and robots to massive enterprise clusters.

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

Generated with Cortex Code for All Data and AI Weekly - March 16, 2026

All Data and AI Weekly #232-09March2026

Timothy Spann — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:19:28 +0000

All Data and AI Weekly #232-09March2026

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

Tim's Corner: SNACK-AI Innovations

Welcome to issue 232! This week is packed with exciting developments across the Snowflake ecosystem. We're seeing major advances in semantic views, Cortex Code extensibility, and the OpenFlow Oracle connector going GA. The MCP Conference in NYC is just days away, and there's never been a better time to dive into building stateful AI agents. Let's explore!

Upcoming Events: Catch Tim Live!

For in-person I have a new sticker!

March 11: MCP Conference NYC - NYC Tim Speaking
March 12: Data for Breakfast NYC - NYC Hands on Labs
March 18: Data for Breakfast Princeton - Princeton
March 19: Warsaw IT Days - Virtual
March 24: NYC Snowflake Users Group - NYC Hands on Workshop
April 14: D4BNA - Virtual US
April 15: Nodes AI Conference - Virtual
April 13-17: D4BV - Virtual APAC
May 20: Budapest Data and AI - Budapest, Hungary - Tim Virtual speaking

All Snowflake Events: https://www.snowflake.com/about/events/

Special Discount Codes:

MCP Conference: 50% off with SPEAKER SOCIAL

Featured: Cortex Code Extensibility

Snowflake has released comprehensive documentation on Cortex Code Extensibility, enabling developers to extend and customize their AI-powered coding assistant workflows.

Key Capabilities:

Custom skill development and integration
Extended tool configurations
Workflow automation patterns
Integration with external systems

Semantic Views Updates

Semantic Views with Tableau Integration

The Snowflake engineering team published a deep dive on integrating Semantic Views with Tableau, enabling business users to leverage curated semantic layers directly in their visualization workflows.

Range Joins Support (Feb 25)

Semantic Views now support custom range joins, allowing more flexible temporal and interval-based queries against your semantic models.

Documentation:

Semi-Additive Metrics (Mar 5)

New support for semi-additive metrics in Semantic Views enables accurate calculations for metrics like inventory levels, account balances, and headcount that shouldn't be simply summed across time dimensions.

Cortex AI & Agents

AGENT_RUN Function

The AGENT_RUN function provides a programmatic interface for executing Cortex Agents directly from SQL, enabling seamless integration of AI agents into data pipelines and applications.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/functions/agent_run-snowflake-cortex

AI Complete Document Intelligence

Cortex AI's Document Intelligence capabilities have expanded, providing enhanced extraction and understanding of unstructured documents including PDFs, images, and complex layouts.

AI Functions Cost Management (GA - Mar 2)

Monitor and control your Cortex AI Functions spending with new account usage views and cost management features now Generally Available.

Documentation:

Using AI to Improve AI

The Snowflake engineering blog explores innovative approaches to using AI systems to enhance other AI systems, covering evaluation frameworks, automated prompt optimization, and self-improving architectures.

Agent World Model for Agentic RL

Deep dive into Agent World Models for agentic reinforcement learning - a novel approach enabling AI agents to build internal models of their environment for better decision-making.

Demystifying Evals for AI Agents

Anthropic published an excellent engineering guide on evaluation strategies for AI agents, covering metrics, benchmarks, and practical approaches to measuring agent performance.

Apache Iceberg Updates

Iceberg v3 Support (Preview)

Snowflake's Apache Iceberg v3 support is now in Preview, bringing enhanced partitioning, new data types, and improved interoperability.

Documentation:

Delta Deletion Vectors (Mar 2)

Support for Iceberg Delta deletion vectors enables efficient row-level deletes without rewriting entire data files.

Catalog-Linked Database Config (Mar 6)

New SYSTEM$GET_CATALOG_LINKED_DATABASE_CONFIG function for retrieving configuration details of catalog-linked databases.

OpenFlow: Oracle CDC Connector (GA)

The Snowflake OpenFlow Connector for Oracle is now Generally Available! This agentless CDC solution enables near real-time data replication from Oracle to Snowflake.

Key Features:

Agentless architecture - no software to install on Oracle servers
Real-time change data capture
Automatic schema evolution
Transaction consistency guarantees

Documentation:

Community Article: No Data Left Behind with Snowflake OpenFlow

Snowflake Postgres & pg_lake

Postgres Time Series with Iceberg

Engineering deep dive on building time series solutions with Snowflake Postgres and Apache Iceberg integration.

pg_lake Hits 1.4K Stars

The open source pg_lake project continues its momentum, now with 1,400+ GitHub stars! pg_lake brings Iceberg and data lake capabilities directly to PostgreSQL.

The New Stack Coverage: pg_lake Comes to Snowflake Postgres

Postgres Tools

pgSchema: Visual schema management - https://www.pgschema.com/
pgConsole: Web-based Postgres console - https://www.pgconsole.com/

Cortex Code Resources

Best Practices Guide

Comprehensive guide covering Cortex Code CLI best practices for data exploration, code generation, and workflow optimization.

CLI Reference

Complete command reference for the Cortex Code CLI.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cortex-code/cli-reference

UDF Debugging Skill

New skill for debugging User-Defined Functions with Cortex Code, making it easier to troubleshoot Snowpark functions.

GitHub: https://github.com/Snowflake-Applied-Field-Engineering/cortex-code-skill-udf-debugging

CortexChecker

Tool for validating and checking Cortex configurations and deployments.

GitHub: https://github.com/Snowflake-Applied-Field-Engineering/cortexchecker

From the Community: Medium & Blogs

Article	Description
Mastering Semantic Views and Cortex Agents with Cortex Code	Comprehensive guide to building semantic views and agents
Debugging Snowpark Functions with Cortex Code	Step-by-step debugging workflows
From Legacy BI to an Intelligence Layer	Lessons from Snowflake's own BI migration
Snowflake Atlas for Data Quality in Private Equity	Real-world data quality optimization

dbt Labs Updates

dbt Core Version Support (Mar 2)

New dbt Core versions are now supported for dbt Projects on Snowflake.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/data-engineering/dbt-projects-on-snowflake-dbt-core-versions

ADE-Bench

The Analytics Data Engineering Benchmark (ADE-Bench) from dbt Labs provides standardized benchmarks for evaluating data engineering workflows.

GitHub: https://github.com/dbt-labs/ade-bench

Education: Building AI Agents on Coursera

New Coursera course: Building AI Agents with Snowflake

What You'll Learn:

Create AI agents that autonomously solve business problems
Enable agents to query databases and search documents via natural language
Evaluate agent reliability and optimize with orchestration instructions
Use Model Context Protocol (MCP) for external integrations

Course Link: https://www.coursera.org/learn/building-ai-agents-with-snowflake

MCP & Agent Tools

Cortex MCP Quick Suite

Quick-start templates for building MCP-enabled Cortex applications.

GitHub: https://github.com/sfc-gh-mmarzillo/cortex-mcp-quick-suite

Cortex MCP AgentCore

Core framework for building MCP-based agents with Cortex.

GitHub: https://github.com/sfc-gh-mmarzillo/cortex-mcp-agentcore

CortexCode Auto Agent

Automated agent workflows with Cortex Code.

GitHub: https://github.com/sarathi-aiml/CortexCode_Auto_Agent

Claude Platform Marketplace

Anthropic's Claude Platform Marketplace for discovering and sharing Claude-based solutions.

Link: https://claude.com/platform/marketplace

StreamNative Remote MCP Server

Webinar on implementing remote MCP servers with StreamNative.

Register: https://hs.streamnative.io/webinar-introducing-the-streamnative-remote-mcp-server

Developer Resources

Event Table Setup for Logging

Guide to setting up event tables for logging and tracing in Snowflake.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/developer-guide/logging-tracing/event-table-setting-up

Restricted Caller's Rights in Streamlit

New security feature enabling restricted caller's rights in Streamlit applications.

Documentation: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/developer-guide/streamlit/features/restricted-callers-rights

Enterprise AI

Scaling Enterprise AI Agents

How to scale AI agents from pilot to 6,000 users - lessons from enterprise deployments.

Public Sector Data-Informed Intelligence

Building data-informed Snowflake Intelligence solutions for public sector organizations.

People, Data, and AI Governance

Best practices for governance across people, data, and AI systems.

Engineering Deep Dive: Jacobi Forcing

The Snowflake AI Research team published a breakthrough paper on Jacobi Forcing - a training technique that transforms autoregressive transformers into causal parallel decoders.

Key Results:

Up to 4.5x higher tokens-per-forward
4x speedup on HumanEval benchmarks
3.7x speedup on GSM8K reasoning tasks
Preserves efficient KV-cache reuse
No extra drafting-verification stack needed

Ecosystem & Open Source

Apache Parquet: Variant Type

New support for semi-structured data in Apache Parquet with the Variant type.

Apache Gluten

High-performance native execution engine for Spark workloads.

Website: https://gluten.apache.org/

Open Semantic Interchange

Open standard for semantic model interchange across platforms.

Website: https://open-semantic-interchange.org/

Polymarket API

API documentation for the Polymarket prediction market platform.

Documentation: https://docs.polymarket.com/api-reference/introduction

GitHub Trending

Repository	Description
pixeltable/pixeltable	AI data infrastructure for multimodal applications
KeygraphHQ/shannon	Information-theoretic data analysis
EpicenterHQ/epicenter	Event-driven architecture framework
ValueCell-ai/ClawX	AI-powered data extraction
egoist/sitefetch	Fast website content fetcher
BIT-DataLab/Edit-Banana	Image editing framework
giovantenne/lastsignal	Signal processing toolkit
iamsrikanthnani/pluely	Data pipeline orchestration
vustagc/pianoterm	Terminal-based piano

Security & OSINT Tools

apurvsinghgautam/dark-web-osint-tools - OSINT tools collection
josh0xA/darkdump - Dark web search utility

Additional Resources

EY Open Science Challenge: https://challenge.ey.com/
Weather Data Attribution: https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/data-source-attribution/
Vis de Urbel: https://visdeurbel.nl/en/
ClickHouse Benchmarks: https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/

SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern

As we look forward in 2026, SNACK-AI is the architectural pattern for powering AI applications at any scale - from mobile phones and robots to massive enterprise clusters.

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

Thanks to Cortex Code for formatting:

Generated for All Data and AI Weekly - March 9, 2026

📰 All Data and AI Weekly #231-02March2026

Timothy Spann — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:14:17 +0000

📰 All Data and AI Weekly #231-02 March 2026

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

Blizzard!!! So much snow here.

🌟 Tim's Corner: SNACKAI Innovations

Recent dashboards and pipelines from Tim Spann.

SNACKAI CoCo Dashboards: Visualizing real-time AI and connectivity data.
SNACKAI CoCo DBT-MTA Pipeline: Advanced data modeling for transit analytics.
SNACKAI CoCo NYC OPSCenter: Operations center monitoring for municipal data.

🗓️ Upcoming Events: Catch Tim Live!

For in-person I have a new sticker!

March 3: NYC Interactive
March 4: AI and Data Sharing
March 6: LLM Days NYC - NYC Tim Speaking
March 11: MCP Conference NYC – NYC Tim Speaking
March 12: Data for Breakfast NYC – NYC Hands on Labs
March 18: Data for Breakfast Princeton - Princeton
March 19: Warsaw IT Days - Virtual
March 24: NYC Snowflake Users Group - NYC Hands on Workshop
April 15: Nodes AI Conference - Virtual
May 20: Budapest Data and AI – Budapest, Hungary - Tim Virtual speaking

https://www.snowflake.com/about/events/

Coupon for MCP Conference

https://luma.com/qi5g9hke?coupon=SPEAKER%20SOCIAL%2050%25

“From TrafficAI to GhostBreakers: Building Stateful AI Agents with Cortex, OpenFlow, and Snowflake Postgres”

Next week, I’ll be presenting at LLMday New York Q1 on 6 March.
I’ll share how to build stateful AI agents inside Snowflake that operate on live data, coordinate across workflows, and hold context across complex tasks.

Secure your spot at 50% off with my code LASTMINUTE

The 17th edition of Warsaw IT Days is taking place online on March 19th and at the PGE National Stadium in Warsaw on March 20th, and I have the pleasure of participating as a speaker. In addition to my presentation, you can also enjoy over 300 lectures across 25 different thematic tracks.

Join and hear about the latest trends and solutions in IT and data science, take advantage of the opportunity to deepen your technical knowledge, and exchange experiences with a community of over 10,000 industry specialists and managers.

More information and registration at: https://warszawskiedniinformatyki.pl/en/

https://hs.streamnative.io/webinar-introducing-the-streamnative-remote-mcp-server?ut

❄️ The Snowflake Ecosystem

Snowflake is moving fast with Cortex, OpenFlow, and Apache Iceberg.

Cortex & AI Capabilities

Cortex Code CLI Expansion: Now supporting more workflows for developers.
Advanced Cortex Skills: Deep dive into Code CLI extensibility.
Cortex Agent Evaluations: Measuring the performance of your AI agents.
MLflow-like LLM Evaluation: Native evaluation tools within the platform.
Snowflake Copilot Guide: Getting started with the built-in AI assistant.

Data Engineering & Connectivity

Replacing Debezium with OpenFlow: A new paradigm for data movement.
OpenFlow Explained: A human body analogy for data flow.
Streamlining Postgres to Snowflake: Simplifying the migration and sync process.
Iceberg Tables & Hierarchical Paths: Enhancing partitioning in the open lakehouse.
Row Timestamps: Better tracking of data changes.

Semantic Layers & Analytics

Semantic View Autopilot: Automating the creation of semantic layers.
Best Practices for Cortex Analyst: Optimizing for natural language queries.
End-to-End Analytics with Tableau: Leveraging semantic views for BI.

🔌 The Rise of MCP (Model Context Protocol)

The new standard for connecting AI models to data sources.

Official Google MCP Repository: The core protocol documentation and SDKs.
Awesome MCP Servers: A curated list of servers to extend your AI.
Postgres MCP: Connecting LLMs directly to your Postgres databases.
MS Copilot Studio & Snowflake MCP: Bridging Microsoft and Snowflake via MCP.
MCP-Use: Practical implementations of the protocol.

🛠️ Open Source & Developer Tools

Essential repos and tools for the modern data stack.

Pandas-AI: Talk to your dataframes in natural language.
Kreuzberg: A modern library for text extraction.
MegaParse: The ultimate parser for LLMs.
Polaris Local Forge: Local development for Apache Polaris.
SQL Studio: A SQL database explorer that runs in the browser.
PG Dog: Postgres replication and load balancing.
Traccar: Modern GPS tracking system.
FingerprintJS: Browser fingerprinting for fraud detection.

🧠 AI Research & Multi-Agent Systems

Where the industry is heading next.

Spotify’s Multi-Agent Architecture: How Spotify uses agents for smarter advertising.
Graph Agents for Snowflake: Integrating knowledge graphs with AI agents.
Raptor: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval.
Ironclaw: High-performance AI reasoning frameworks.

📊 Deep Dive: Data Engineering & Storage

Formats, parsers, and performance.

Geospatial Types in Parquet: Native support for spatial data is finally here.
Hardwood Parser: A high-performance Java parser for Parquet.
Apache DataSketches: A library for approximate queries on big data.
Postgres JSONB & TOAST: Understanding storage internals.
DuckDB & Apache Arrow: Speeding up PySpark workloads.

📺 Community & Events

Snowflake Connect AI EMEA: Check out the upcoming agenda.
Observe Podcast: How Observe uses Iceberg and Snowflake.
State of Data Engineering: A comprehensive repo on the current industry landscape.
AI Improving AI Video: Insightful discussion on self-improving systems.

Quick Links

📜 Historical Throwback

Looking back to see how far we've come.

Deep Learning on HDP (2018): A look back at running neural networks on Hortonworks Data Platform in Prague.

🍭 2026: SNACK-AI

As we look forward in 2026, we are introducing SNACK-AI. This architectural pattern is designed to power AI applications at any scale—from mobile phones and robots to massive enterprise clusters.

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg (Apache Iceberg)
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

📰 All Data and AI Weekly #230-23 Feb 2026

Timothy Spann — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:53:32 +0000

📰 All Data and AI Weekly #230-23 Feb 2026

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

Blizzard!!! So much snow here.

🗓️ Upcoming Events: Catch Tim Live!

March 6: LLM Days NYC - NYC Tim Speaking
March 11: MCP Conference NYC – NYC Tim Speaking
March 12: Data for Breakfast – NYC Hands on Labs
May 20: Budapest Data and AI – Budapest, Hungary - Tim Virtual speaking

🌟 Featured Highlight: Tim Spann’s Corner

IoT meets Agentic Streams

This week, Tim Spann continues to push the boundaries of real-time data and agentic integration. Two major repositories caught our eye:

SNACKAI-CoCo-MCP-Server-Integration: A cutting-edge implementation focusing on Model Context Protocol (MCP) server integration. This is a must-watch for anyone looking to build standardized interfaces for AI agents to interact with IoT data streams.
Snowflake-Initializr: Simplifying the "Day 0" experience for Snowflake developers. This tool streamlines the setup of new projects, ensuring best practices are baked in from the first line of code.

❄️ The Snowflake Deep Dive

Snowflake is moving fast on two fronts: Governance/DevOps and Agentic Intelligence.

Infrastructure & Governance

Version Control for Semantic Views: Snowflake is bringing software engineering rigor to data modeling. Read more on the Engineering Blog.
Terraforming Snowflake: A comprehensive guide to managing your data warehouse as code. Check out the Quickstart.
Cost Management & Anomalies: With new documentation on Cost Anomalies and insights into spending patterns, keeping your cloud spend under control has never been more visible.
Trust Center Integration: Learn how to Classify UI and leverage the Trust Center to secure your data estate.

The AI Frontier

Cortex AI + Claude 3.5 Sonnet: The powerhouse model is now integrated into Snowflake Cortex AI, enabling high-reasoning tasks directly within your data platform. Read the announcement.
Cortex Agents & Web Search: Snowflake agents can now go beyond your internal data to perform Web Searches.
Observability: Monitor your agentic workflows with the new Cortex Agent Usage History.

🤖 Agentic Ecosystem & Research

The industry is moving toward "World Models" for agents. Here are the key resources released this week:

Snowflake Agent World Model: Snowflake Labs has open-sourced the code and datasets (1K) for training agents that understand complex environments.
MIT AI Agent Index: A new benchmark and directory for tracking the capabilities of the world's leading AI agents.
AgentSkills.io & Vercel Skills: Frameworks for defining and deploying the specific capabilities (skills) that agents use to interact with the world.

🛠️ Developer Tooling & Data Movement

Netflix Data Bridge: A fascinating look at how Netflix simplifies massive data movement across their infrastructure.
Liquibase Secure 5.1: Change control for Snowflake is getting a security boost.
PostgresGUI.com: A new, streamlined way to manage your Postgres instances.
WebMCP: Bringing the Model Context Protocol to the browser.

Notable Repositories

AirLLM: Run large models on consumer hardware with extreme memory efficiency.
OpenObserve: A cloud-native observability platform that’s gaining serious traction.
Nixtla: The go-to library for state-of-the-art time series forecasting.

📈 Careers & Growth

From BI to AI: Jimish Kadakia shares a roadmap for evolving from a BI Developer to a Solutions Architect in the age of Snowflake and AI.

Stay curious, keep streaming.

🍭 2026: SNACK-AI

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg (Apache Iceberg)
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

📰 All Data and AI Weekly #229-16 Feb 2026

Timothy Spann — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:55:39 +0000

📰 All Data and AI Weekly #229-16 Feb 2026

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

Edition: February 16, 2026 | Agentic AI, IoT Mesh, and Data Cloud Evolution

Sales Kickoff Week for Snowflake. I was in Portland heads down learning cool new stuff.

🗓️ Upcoming Events: Catch Tim Live!

March 6: LLM Days NYC - NYC Tim Speaking
March 11: MCP Conference – NYC Tim Speaking
March 12: Data for Breakfast – NYC Hands on Labs
May 20: Budapest Data and AI – Budapest, Hungary - Tim Virtual speaking

🛠️ Tim Spann’s Corner: IoT & Agentic Streams

Tim Spann continues to push the boundaries of where data starts and where it ends. From mesh networks to real-time vision, here is the latest:

Agentic AI Data Streams & Meshtastic: Explore how agentic AI is finding its way into off-grid, decentralized communication networks.
SNACKAI-CoCo-Meshtastic: A new repository focused on combining messaging protocols with AI at the edge.
SenseHAT Snowflake Streaming: A practical guide and codebase for streaming environmental data from Raspberry Pi SenseHATs directly into Snowflake.
OpenAI Guardrails: Essential tools for implementing safety and structure in your LLM-powered applications.
NYC Camera Stream: Real-time data processing using New York City’s public camera feeds.

❄️ Snowflake Spotlight: Cortex & Enterprise Agents

Snowflake is rapidly evolving into an "AI-first" platform. This week’s updates focus heavily on Cortex Code and the scaling of enterprise-grade agents.

🤖 AI & Agents

Scaling Enterprise Agents: A deep dive into how organizations are moving from simple chatbots to fully autonomous enterprise agents.
Snowflake Cortex Code: Understand why Cortex Code matters and exactly when you should deploy it for your analytics.
Quantitative Research with AI Functions: A developer guide on using built-in AI functions to accelerate financial and data research.

📊 Modern Data Operations

Cost Attribution Manager in Streamlit: Learn how to build a custom UI to track and manage your Snowflake spend using Cortex Code.
Snowflake Optima: Official documentation for the latest optimization features to keep your warehouse running lean.
SnowConvert AI (Feb 2026): New features to simplify the migration of legacy codebases into the Snowflake ecosystem.

💻 Developer Tools & Open Source

A curated list of repositories and guides for the modern data engineer:

Open-Source Face Recognition SDK: A high-performance SDK for integrating facial recognition into your applications.
Real-Time Recommendations: Building two-tower networks with Snowflake’s online feature serving.
Snowflake Data UI Guide: Choosing the right interface—from Snowsight to custom Streamlit apps—for every use case.
xleak: A security-focused tool for detecting data leaks.
Antigravity Awesome Skills & Voog: New open-source entries worth starring for your development workflow.

📅 Upcoming Events & Reading

Webinar: Getting More from SAP Data with Snowflake (Feb 24, 2026).
Article: Pliable AI & Analytics for SMBs - How small businesses are leveraging the AI wave.
Reading List: Snowflake Safe - A curated list of best practices for security and governance.

🍭 2026: SNACK-AI

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg (Apache Iceberg)
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

All Data and AI Weekly #227-02 Feb 2026

Timothy Spann — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:15:09 +0000

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

📰 All Data and AI Weekly #227-02 Feb 2026

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

🛠️ Tim's Latest Projects & Content

Here is the latest from the lab, focusing on Real-time AI, Edge Computing, and Data Lakehouses.

Code: Nvidia Streaming Projects

📚 The Curated "Stuff" List

A collection of interesting repositories, articles, and tools found around the ecosystem.

❄️ Snowflake, Cortex & Data Engineering

Deep Dive Series: Ontology on Snowflake
Agents & AI in Snowflake
Architecture & Migration

🤖 Generative AI, LLMs & Agents

Frameworks & Tools
NVIDIA & Earth Science
- NVIDIA Earth-2 High Performance Computing
- Repo: Earth2Studio

🛠️ Developer Tools & Utilities

Observability & Debugging
Web & Productivity
- Awesome Ralph
- WebRockets
- Timestation
- ClearCam
- GitHub Spec Kit

🌐 APIs & Fun Resources

Free Public APIs List
MeowFacts API
IPLocate

📰 Community Highlights & Extra Reads

Frameworks & Hackathons:

📺 Watch:

YouTube: Video Link
YouTube: Video Link

🔗 Social & Quick Links:

Note: LangChain/LangGraph is highly recommended for stateful, multi-step agent workflows and RAG.

🍭 2026: SNACK-AI

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg (Apache Iceberg)
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

All Data and AI Weekly #225-19 Jan 2026

Timothy Spann — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:34:48 +0000

All Data and AI Weekly #225-19 Jan 2026

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

Sorry for missing the Flink talk on Thursday, there was a death in my family.

❄️ Tim Spann's New Stuff ❄️

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PkA6rzcsEo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYwvfK3U6LA

https://github.com/tspannhw/AllDataAndAIWeekly/blob/main/talks/15JanMeetup_Real%20Time%20AI%20Pipeline%20Architectures%20with%20Flink%20SQL%2C%20NiFi%2C%20Kafka%20and%20Iceberg.pdf

🚀 Top Headlines

OpenAI Introduces GPT-5.2 Codex

A massive leap forward in code generation and reasoning. This release promises to change how we approach automated development pipelines.

Read the Announcement

Snowflake & OpenAI: Cortex AI Evolution

Snowflake has officially announced deep integration with OpenAI for Cortex AI, streamlining the ability to bring LLMs to your data without moving it.

Read the Blog

Snowflake to Acquire Observe for $1 Billion A major move in the observability space. Snowflake announces its intent to acquire Observe to deliver AI-powered observability at enterprise scale, bridging the gap between data and action. Press Release | News Coverage | Why Observe?

2025 Databases Retrospective Professor Andy Pavlo’s annual retrospective is out. A must-read summary of the winners, losers, and major shifts in the database landscape over the last year. Read the Blog

Data Engineering in 2026: From ETL to Autonomy An outlook on how the role of the data engineer is shifting from building pipelines to managing autonomous data systems. Read Article

❄️ Snowflake Technical Deep Dives

Real-Time CDC: A guide to low-latency Postgres CDC to Snowflake for real-time AI analytics. Medium Guide
OpenFlow Integration:
- Syncing Postgres to Native Tables
- Turbocharge Your Pipeline
Iceberg & Interop: Connect Databricks Unity Catalog to Snowflake via Iceberg REST. Tutorial
Optimization:
- Fast Table Comparison with Hash Functions
- Replication & Failover Strategies
Apps: Build a News Sentiment Analytics app completely with prompts. Tutorial
Community:
- Submit Your Snowflake Story
- SnowGram (Instagram on Snowflake?)

❄️ Snowflake Ecosystem Updates

The Snowflake platform continues to evolve with a focus on governance and data apps.

Trust Center & Classification: New features for sensitive data classification are now live. Release Notes
Data Clean Rooms (DCR): Updates to DCR functionality for secure data sharing. Documentation
Schema Evolution: Snowpipe Streaming now supports schema evolution, reducing pipeline breakage. Learn More
Performance Tuning:
- Warehouse Sizing Guide
- Query Insights - Specific recommendations for per-query improvements.
Views & Lineage:
- External Lineage Guide
- Views, Materialized Views, and Dynamic Tables

🧊 Data Engineering: Iceberg, Flink & Streaming

Real-time architectures are shifting heavily toward open table formats.

Deep Dive PDF: Real-Time AI Pipeline Architectures with Flink SQL, NiFi, Kafka, and Iceberg. View Slides
Apache Polaris: Mapping legacy and heterogeneous data lakes in Polaris. Blog Post
Implementation Guides:

🤖 AI Agents & LLM Tooling

The "Agentic" workflow is becoming the standard for enterprise AI.

Connecting Agents: Bridging Snowflake Cortex to the A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocol. Medium Article | GitHub Repo
Healthcare Agents: A curated list of awesome AI agents for healthcare. GitHub Repo
Asset Management: Agentic AI for Asset Management guide. GitHub Repo
Pocket TTS: High-quality text-to-speech generation. Kyutai Labs
Java for AI: Java 25 features JBang notebooks and GraalPy for interactive learning. JavaPro Article

🤖 AI Agents, Cortex & LLMs

Cortex & Agents Resources:
Learning & Frameworks:
- 30 Days of AI: A streamlined learning path for building AI apps with Streamlit. GitHub
- TruLens + LlamaIndex: Evaluating Agent workflows. Notebook
- Auto-Claude: Automating tasks with Claude. GitHub
- LLMRouter: Optimized routing for LLM queries. GitHub
- VideoRAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation for video content. GitHub

🛡️ Security & OSINT Toolkit

A large collection of Open Source Intelligence and security tools dropped this week.

IntelOwl: Open source Intelligence Management Platform. GitHub
DataSploit: OSINT Framework to perform reconnaissance. GitHub
TheHive Cortex: Analyzers for the Security Orchestration platform (Note: Distinct from Snowflake Cortex). GitHub
Osweep: Open Source Wireless Security Auditing. GitHub
Web Check: All-in-one website OSINT tool. Website
Snowflake Security:
- SI Cybersecurity Challenge
- Log to Action

🛠 Developer Toolkit

New utilities to speed up your workflow.

Data Lake Explorer: A tool for navigating your data lake. GitHub
Frogmouth: A markdown viewer for the terminal. GitHub
Glow: Render markdown on the CLI. GitHub
Bat: A cat clone with wings (syntax highlighting). GitHub
Kangaroo: SQL client for popular databases. GitHub

🛠 Developer Utilities

Taws: A Terminal User Interface (TUI) for AWS. GitHub
Hardwood: A Kafka log viewer/tool. GitHub
Gastown: Steve Yegge's latest project. GitHub
VSCodium: Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS Code. Why VSCodium?
Quantum Tunnel: Expose your local service to the internet. Docs
Strix: GitHub | YT Playlist Downloader: GitHub

📺 Watchlist & Events

Webinar: Architect for AI with Open Formats (AWS + Snowflake). Watch Here
Upcoming Meetup: NY Apache Flink Meetup. RSVP Here
Video: Java 25 & Interactive Learning
Video: Latest AI Talks
Webinar: Build Your Own Enterprise Intelligence Agent (Jan 8, 2026). Watch Replay
Event: Retail AI @ Hakkoda. Event Page
Video: Featured Tech Talk

Data

🍭 2026: SNACK-AI

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg (Apache Iceberg)
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

All Data and AI Weekly #224-12 Jan 2026

Timothy Spann — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:07:50 +0000

All Data and AI Weekly #224-12 Jan 2026

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

🚀 The Lead Story: Snowflake Acquires Observe

"Observability is a Data Problem"

In a major move to own the entire data lifecycle, Snowflake has announced its intent to acquire Observe for approximately $1 Billion. This acquisition signals a shift away from siloed monitoring tools towards "AI-powered observability" where telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) lives directly within the Data Cloud.

Why it matters: It promises to break down the wall between "business data" and "operational data," enabling AI agents to troubleshoot infrastructure using the same context they use for analytics.
Key Stat: Snowflake aims to lower observability costs by allowing enterprises to ingest and retain 100% of telemetry data, rather than sampling it due to cost constraints.
Press Release | Observe Announcement

❄️ Snowflake & Data Engineering

Technical deep dives for the modern data stack.

⚡ Low-Latency CDC & OpenFlow

The lines between transactional and analytical databases are blurring. A new "Lift and Shift" capability allows native Postgres tables to run directly within Snowflake, paired with OpenFlow (Snowflake's managed NiFi service) to build low-latency CDC pipelines. This is critical for feeding real-time AI models without fragile ETL glue code.

🧊 Iceberg & Unity Catalog

Interoperability continues to be a major theme. New patterns allow connecting Databricks Unity Catalog directly to Snowflake via the Iceberg REST catalog, reinforcing the "open table format" war is ending in a truce of compatibility.

Connect Databricks Unity to Snowflake

🤖 The AI Agent Ecosystem

Autonomous coding, Red Teaming, and Orchestration.

🛠️ Builders & Orchestrators

Auto-Claude: An autonomous coding agent framework that goes beyond simple completion. It uses a multi-agent approach to plan, execute, and debug code.
- GitHub Repo
Gas Town: Steve Yegge’s latest project. It’s a multi-agent orchestration system (using tmux) designed to manage fleets of Claude Code instances.
- GitHub Repo
VideoRAG: A new framework that allows LLMs to "reason" over long-form videos by retrieving specific temporal segments rather than processing the whole file.
- GitHub Repo

🛡️ AI Security (Red Teaming)

Strix: An open-source AI agent designed for automated penetration testing. It mimics human hacker behavior to find vulnerabilities in your stack.
- GitHub Repo
Cortex Analyzers: For those using TheHive for incident response, these analyzers are essential for enriching threat data.
- GitHub Repo

🔒 Security Corner

OSINT and Threat Intel tools for the paranoid.

Web-Check: The ultimate "check this website" tool. It runs dozens of checks (DNS, SSL, headers, server info) in one dashboard.
- Web-Check.xyz
IntelOwl: A scalable API for threat intelligence management. It orchestrates various analyzers to generate a single "threat report" for an observable.
- GitHub Repo
DataSploit: An OSINT framework to perform reconnaissance on domain names, emails, and usernames.
- GitHub Repo

🧰 Developer Toolkit

Utilities to speed up your workflow.

VSCodium: A clean, telemetry-free build of VS Code. If you want the editor without the tracking, this is the standard.
- Why VSCodium?
YouTube Playlist Downloader: A simple, robust script for archiving playlists locally.
- GitHub Repo
Hardwood: Interesting work from the data engineering community (likely related to durable execution or storage engines).
- GitHub Repo

📚 Full Resource List

🍭 2026: SNACK-AI

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg (Apache Iceberg)
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann

All Data and AI Weekly #223-05 Jan 2026

Timothy Spann — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:17:40 +0000

All Data and AI Weekly #223-05 Jan 2026

( AI, Data, NiFi, Iceberg, Polaris, Streamlit, Flink, Kafka, Python, Java, SQL, MCP, LLM, RAG, Cortex AI, AISQL, Search, Unstructured Data )

Edition: January 05, 2026 - 223 | Focus: Agentic AI, High-Performance Streaming, & Snowflake Intelligence

NiFi + AI + AI Data Cloud + Iceberg.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataEngineeringForAI/hot/

The Agentic Data Era

Code and Open Source Projects

https://github.com/tspannhw/TrafficAI/tree/main/Agents

https://github.com/tspannhw/conferences

🌟 Top Story: The Rise of Agentic AI Foundations

The industry has reached a turning point in AI orchestration. The Linux Foundation has officially announced the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation, a move designed to standardize the way autonomous agents interact, reason, and execute tasks.

In parallel, the ecosystem is rapidly maturing with tools like Goose—an open-source AI agent that enhances developer productivity—and Unblink, signaling a shift from simple "Chatbots" to proactive "Agents" that live within our IDEs and data stacks.

❄️ Snowflake Spotlight: Engineering the Modern Data Fabric

High-Performance Streaming & Iceberg

Snowflake's architecture is evolving to prioritize open standards and real-time ingestion.

Snowpipe Streaming to Iceberg: New architectural guides highlight how to achieve high-performance streaming directly into Iceberg tables, combining the agility of streaming with the portability of open formats.
Dynamic Tables 2026 Guide: Master zero-copy backfills and dual virtual warehouse strategies to optimize your transformation pipelines.
CDC Simplified: A new developer guide walks through building streaming data pipelines using CDC, Snowpipe Streaming, and Dynamic Tables.

The Agentic Intelligence Layer

Snowflake is no longer just a data warehouse; it is an agentic platform.

Cortex Agent Evaluations: With the new GPA Framework, teams can now quantitatively measure the performance of AI agents.
Multi-Agent Orchestration: Learn to build complex systems using Snowflake Intelligence to orchestrate multiple agents for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and FSI applications.
Managed MCP for Cortex: Developers can now leverage the OpenAI SDK alongside Managed Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give Cortex agents even more context.

🛠️ Developer Corner: New Repos & Tools

Project	Description
Cortex Agent Widget	A plug-and-play UI component for integrating Cortex agents into your applications.
A2UI	An innovative UI framework for agentic applications.
Performance Tax Reporting	Real-time financial reporting demo using modern streaming stacks.
Data Harmonization	A framework for unifying disparate data sources within Snowflake.
SigDigger	Digital signal analyzer for those working at the intersection of hardware and data.

📚 Deep Dives & Guides

Financial Services (FSI): Build an AI Assistant for FSI using AI-SQL.
Supply Chain: Analyze logistics data using Snowpark Connect for Apache Spark.
Insurance: Explore the Insurance Claims Agent reference architecture.
Well-Architected Framework: Updated chapters on Reliability and Cost Optimization/FinOps.

💡 Expert Perspective: SAP & Snowflake

The integration between SAP and Snowflake is "ringing in the new year" with a unified, AI-ready agentic data fabric. This partnership allows enterprises to bridge the gap between operational ERP data and analytical AI agents, creating a seamless flow from business process to automated insight.

🚀 Quick Links

🍭 2026: SNACK-AI

SNACK-AI integrates:

Snowflake Platform
NiFi (Apache)
Apache Iceberg (Apache Iceberg)
Cortex AI (Agents/Search/MCP)
Kafka (Apache Kafka)

Deep Dive into SNACK-AI:

Read: SNACK-AI: The 2026 Pattern (Medium)
Code: Official SNACK-AI GitHub Repository
Weekly Context: SNACK-AI Overview

Thanks

https://sessionize.com/tspann

https://github.com/timothyspann