Snowflake Horizon Catalog¶

Context for AI¶

Snowflake Intelligence empowers users across the organization to engage with data intuitively by allowing them to ask questions and immediately obtain answers, insights, and visualizations. Snowflake Intelligence brings all your structured and unstructured data together and uses helpful AI agents that understand your business through your semantic views and search services. Powered by Cortex AI Functions, Cortex Analyst, and Cortex Search, Snowflake Intelligence delivers clear, trustworthy insights while keeping everything secure and fully governed inside Snowflake. With easy access to leading models and cross-region inference, every user can explore, discover, and act with confidence.

Easy and safe data discovery across clouds¶

Horizon Catalog gives users one place to find all data resources with consistent metadata about Snowflake data, Apache Iceberg™ data, and external relational sources and BI tools. Horizon Catalog expands visibility through Internal Marketplace listings so teams can discover governed data products without copying data. Horizon Catalog enforces access control, protects sensitive fields with dynamic data masking, applies row access policies, and identifies sensitive data through data classification.

Horizon Catalog supports enforcing row access and data masking policies on Apache Iceberg tables that you query from Apache Spark™ through Snowflake Horizon Catalog. For more information, see Enforce data protection policies when querying Apache Iceberg™ tables from Apache Spark™.

Enterprise-grade security and governance¶

Horizon Catalog makes it easy to keep data safe, consistent, and well understood across your entire organization. It applies sensitive data classification, retention, and data access policies the same way everywhere, giving every engine a shared view of your metadata, lineage, and rules. With access history and Time Travel, teams can confidently review past activity and data states. Governance flows naturally to external storage, Iceberg tables, and the Snowflake Marketplace, so shared data products always carry their tags and permissions wherever they go.

Interoperability without vendor lock-in¶

Horizon Catalog connects all compute engines and formats through one governed environment. It presents consistent metadata and permissions to Snowflake, Spark, and engines that read Apache Iceberg. Horizon Catalog governs data inside Snowflake and in external storage through external tables and Iceberg tables. It carries governance into the Marketplace by sharing data products through internal exchanges while preserving tags and access rules. Horizon Catalog ensures every engine sees the same definitions, lineage, and policy behavior.

A central spot for managing business continuity¶

Within Horizon, you manage primary and secondary environments with ease, keeping them consistent through database and account replication so your data, policies, and configurations stay aligned across every region and account.