Snowflake to acquire Datometry to bolster its automated migration tools

Snowflake has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire San Francisco-headquartered startup Datometry, for an undisclosed sum, to bolster SnowConvert AI, one of its existing set of migration tools.

SnowConvert AI, which is powered by Snowflake’s Cortex AI Agents, is a free product that was introduced earlier this year to help enterprises reduce the complexity and time required to migrate their data warehouse workloads to Snowflake by not only automating code conversion, but also code verification and validation. The company also offers the Snowpark Migration Accelerator, which focuses solely on moving Spark workloads.

Both products address common issues encountered during workload migrations; enterprises often see challenges such as schema mismatches, code incompatibilities, data corruption, and workflow disruptions, and they typically have to manually test whether the logic, transformations, and operations were correctly translated to the new platform’s syntax and semantics.

Datometry’s acquisition, according to Snowflake, will enable it to integrate the startup’s migration-related technology into SnowConvert AI to further accelerate the product’s ability to reduce the time required for a given migration.

Analysts believe that Snowflake is specifically focused on Datometry’s Hyper-Q, a data warehouse virtualization platform that allows applications written for legacy data warehouses to run on modern cloud platforms without requiring the original SQL code to be rewritten.

Forrester vice president and principal analyst Charlie Dai said that Hyper-Q, which emulates SQL statements and translates data in real time between applications and the cloud data warehouse, will complement SnowConvert AI.

“SnowConvert AI excels at static code conversion, but it still requires code extraction and re‑insertion. Hyper‑Q complements this with on‑the‑fly translation to tackle dynamic constructs and application‑embedded SQL that converters often miss,” Dai said.

Seconding Dai, Pareekh Jain, senior analyst at Jain Consulting, pointed out that this acquisition could help Snowflake differentiate itself from rivals such as AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Azure Synapse, who rely more on traditional ETL and batch migration strategies. 

“Migration is a huge decision for customer enterprises,” Jain said. “CFOs and CTOs are reluctant to move large legacy warehouses [such as] Teradata and Oracle into the cloud because of cost, time, and risk. By offering a more compelling proposition which is faster and lower cost, actually free, Snowflake gains a competitive muscle versus other cloud data warehouses.”

Snowflake’s fiercest rival, Databricks, offers a tool similar to SnowConvert AI, which provides AI-powered insights into conversion scope, configurable code transpilation, LLM-driven transformation, and streamlined validation of migrated systems, thanks to its acquisition of BladeBridge earlier this year. However Databricks does not also offer a product with virtualization capabilities such as those in Hyper-Q.