Artin Avanes, head of core data platform at Snowflake, said that the offering, launched as part of Horizon Catalog, the company’s existing data discovery, management and governance suite, collects metadata from across an enterprise’s data estate, enriches it with business definitions, relationships, lineage, and governance information, and makes that context available across AI and analytics systems.
These capabilities, according to Avanes, build on Snowflake’s acquisition last year of Select Star, a metadata management startup known for its integrations with database systems such as PostgreSQL and MySQL, business intelligence tools like Tableau and Power BI, and data pipeline/orchestration tools such as dbt and Airflow.
Reducing operational complexity of agentic workflows
For CIOs, Horizon Context should reduce operational complexity because it will provide a governed map of their organization’s data estate, said Stephanie Walter, practice lead of the AI Stack at HyperFRAME Research.
“The value is not simply cataloging where data lives; it is giving AI systems the metadata, lineage, permissions, and business context needed to retrieve the right data safely,” Walter said.
