At Snap Analytics, we’ve long championed the power of Snowflake as a modern data platform. Its scalability, elasticity, and simplicity have made it a favourite among data teams. But like many cloud-native platforms, it has historically required a patchwork of tools to deliver a full enterprise data solution.
That’s why the announcement of Openflow, Snowflake’s new data ingestion feature, marks a pivotal moment, not just for Snowflake, but for the wider data ecosystem. Built on Apache NiFi and launched following Snowflake’s acquisition of Datavolo, Openflow enables native data extraction from a wide range of sources, databases, APIs, files, and streaming platforms, directly into Snowflake. It’s visual, drag-and-drop, and code-optional, making it accessible and powerful.
The Power of One Platform
When I first moved from SAP BW to Snowflake in 2018, the contrast was stark. SAP BW, for all its limitations, offered a tightly integrated ETL and data warehousing experience with the ability to extract from a variety of different sources in combination with a graphical interface based approach to transformation with a range on built-in transformation features with SAP transports built in to manage the versioning and deployment process. Snowflake, by contrast, was flexible, cloud-native and fully scalable, but required a constellation of tools to replicate that same end-to-end capability. You needed separate tools for extraction, transformation, CI/CD, observability, cataloguing, and more.
Over the years, Snowflake has steadily expanded its capabilities. But the announcements at the Snowflake Summit 2025, particularly Openflow and the native integration of dbt, represent a major leap forward. Together, they form a complete ETL solution within the Snowflake ecosystem.
With Openflow handling extraction and dbt powering transformation and testing, Snowflake now offers a unified platform for building and managing data pipelines. As with all new features it won’t be the complete solution from day 1 and Openflow certainly won’t instantly replace your existing extraction tools as there is currently only support for a limited set of connectors, however Snowflake has made clear its intent to expand this rapidly.
A Nod to the Past, A Leap to the Future
It’s fascinating to see the industry come full circle. SAP BW’s integrated approach was ahead of its time, but lacked the flexibility and scalability today’s cloud platforms demand. Snowflake, with Openflow and dbt, now offers the best of both worlds: integration without compromise.
For Snowflake customers, this means:
- Fewer tools to manage
- Faster time to value
- Simplified vendor relationships
- A more cohesive developer experience
We’re excited to be at the forefront of this shift and look forward to helping our clients unlock the full potential of Snowflake with Openflow and dbt. Reach out to our team if you’d like to have a demo or understand how you can best make use of these new capabilities.
