Apache Iceberg

CoCo Cloud Agents and Automations are generally available, so Snowflake's coding agent can work after logoff and on a schedule with no tool prompts. Test whether Restricted Session Scope covers scheduled runs before you trust it.

Unity Catalog is the only option here that natively blocks access to models, features and vector indexes, with no licence fee. Collibra earns its price only when one policy must land in Databricks and Snowflake.

Inside one Snowflake account, Claude Sonnet 4.5 costs $3.60/$18.00 per million tokens via AI_COMPLETE but $3.00/$15.00 via the REST API, and AI Credits never take your warehouse discount. Fix the AI path first, then move batch compute onto Iceberg. Leave the catalog last.

Databricks took managed Iceberg tables to GA, so the file format is no longer the lock — but external writes are still Private Preview, and the real markup is GPU serving at $5.50 an A100-hour against $2.79 at Lambda. Move the serving, keep the lakehouse.

Databricks lists 47 servable models to Snowflake's ~30, but Unity Catalog keeps Delta tables read-only to outside engines and Snowflake's own catalog blocks third-party writes outright. Snowflake's exit advantage is narrower than the decks claim: it writes into a catalog you own. On a normalised 10-million-ticket workload the platforms land within 2x of each other; the model tier swings the bill 40x.

Google's Cross-Cloud Lakehouse lets AI agents query AWS S3 and Azure Data Lake as native via Apache Iceberg — zero copy, no egress. CIO and CFO impact.