Snowflake to acquire Select Star to enhance its Horizon Catalog

Snowflake has signed a definitive agreement to acquire San Francisco-based startup Select Star’s team and context metadata platform to enhance its Horizon Catalog offering, the company said in a statement.

Horizon Catalog is a unified data discovery, management, and governance suite inside the cloud-based data warehouse provider’s Data Cloud offering.

Data and governance catalogs such as Snowflake’s Horizon and Databricks’ Unity have been gaining popularity among enterprises as they offer a unified control plane to manage the sprawl of data spread across multiple clouds and applications.

These catalogs also offer a unified contextual view of an enterprises’ data estate, which is increasingly becoming a staple need for enterprises to develop AI-driven applications and agents as they require clean, well-documented, and traceable inputs to perform reliably.

Snowflake plans to use Select Star’s context metadata platform to expand Horizon’s data access capabilities giving its users more options to contextualize data for AI-driven applications and agents.

Select Star already has integrations with database systems like PostgreSQL and MySQL, business intelligence tools like Tableau and Power BI, and data pipeline/orchestration tools like dbt and Airflow.

Race to become the AI-native foundation for enterprises

The expansion of Horizon’s capabilities aligns with Snowflake’s continued efforts to outpace rivals in garnering more data and analytics workloads buoyed by the demand for AI-driven applications and agents.

“Snowflake knows that the battle for AI workloads will be won in metadata, lineage, and trust, not raw storage. Horizon Catalog is a strong foundation, but Select Star brings what Snowflake lacks today, real automated discovery, column level lineage, usage intelligence, and UX that reduces the grunt work data analysts still do,” said Phil Fersht, CEO of HFS Research.

“There is a clear market gap for full stack metadata intelligence that is deeply embedded in the platform, not bolted on. At the same time, Databricks keeps stretching the gap in governance and lineage with Unity Catalog. Snowflake knows it must respond with real acceleration,” Fersht said adding that the inorganic approach to acquiring these capabilities work well for Snowflake.

Snowflake is also locked in a battle with hyperscalers, such as Google, AWS, and Microsoft for dominance in data analytics workloads for AI applications, said ISG Software Research’s executive director David Menninger.

“AI is the hot topic in the market right now, and AI is entirely dependent on data. Our research shows that making data usable for AI is the most common challenge enterprises face with their data,” Menninger said.

The intensity of the battle that Menninger is hinting at is reflected by Snowflake’s previous acquisitions this year.

In June, Snowflake announced its intent to acquire US-based cloud-based PostgreSQL database provider Crunchy Data, in an effort to offer developers an easier way to build AI-based applications by offering a PostgreSQL database, to be dubbed Snowflake Postgres, in its AI Data Cloud.

Although the timing of the deal suggested that Snowflake was responding to Databricks’ acquisition of open source serverless Postgres company Neon, analysts say the two vendors are vying to become “the” AI-native data foundation unifying analytics, operational storage, and machine learning.

Earlier this month,Snowflake acquired Datometry to boost SnowConvert AI, one of its existing set of free migration tools, sharpening its pitch to enterprises that are looking to shift legacy database workloads to cloud and are trying to achieve it without the usual pain, cost, or uncertainty of large-scale rewrites.