Announcing, Matillion’s Support for Snowflake Zero Copy Clone

Too often data teams are left working with stale data. This is because production data is typically kept under lock and key, and is typically copied over to a non-production environment to be analyzed and consumed by the lines of business. As a result, data scientists spend a lot of time waiting for and rarely get, the production data needed to accurately train their models. Consequently, most ML models are deployed without ever being tested on production data.  

When it comes to analytics, it is critical to have access to the best representation of real-time data possible. This allows data scientists to train their models based on real-world datasets to provide the best accuracy for their models. It also allows data engineers to catch any potential scaling or data volume issues that may occur when an analytics job is deployed to production. However, creating copies of production data can be expensive and time-consuming, and may corrupt the source data, which can lead to errors. 

Snowflake’s Zero Copy Clone is a unique feature that allows you to have immediate access to full production data sets in Snowflake without creating copies of the data. This means you can eliminate the need for copying the data from production to a non-production environment. The data is cloned, not copied, in Snowflake and is available for immediate use. Zero Copy Clone saves you time and money by eliminating the need to copy data and can help you catch potential errors in the production dataset. 

Support for Zero Copy Clone is fully integrated with the Matillion ETL platform, making it easy to transform Zero Copy Clone datasets and incorporate them into your data pipelines.  In fact, Matillion is the first data integration provider to enable working with Zero Copy Clode datasets in an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop, low-code/no-code interface. 

Zero Copy Clone is a powerful Snowflake feature that also provides low-cost test environments that better match source systems. Matillion’s support of Zero Copy Clone allows integrated data testing from within Matillion ETL, enabling automation of data testing and subsequent deployment of changes all within the Matillion user interface.       This is a huge time and money saver for organizations that use Snowflake, as it eliminates the need to provision and maintains additional storage infrastructure for testing. It also means that organizations can create as many copies of their database as they need, without worrying about the cost. 

To use Zero Copy Clone from within Matillion, simply specify the source database and the target database you want to create. Matillion will then take care of the rest, creating an identical clone of the source database in the target. 

This new feature is available in production now to all Matillion customers at no additional cost. To use the Zero Copy Clone feature, you simply need to specify whether to use a full or cloned copy of data in your target Snowflake account when configuring a connection in Matillion ETL.