Snowflake stock explodes, Orchestra MCP Live, Snowflake acquires Natoma #136 w/e 29 May 2026

Join the 8,500-strong data herd getting all you need to know about Data for your Friday roundup

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Snowflake Summit is in full swing and they’re announcing a ton of stuff. It’s super exciting, and as Snowflake add a ton of AI features so do we - with our MCP going live earlier this week!

Another update will follow ths weekend with all the updates from summit.

Announcement: Hugo Lu is in San Francisco

If you’re heading to OpenHouse or Snowflake Summit, Drop HL a message and he would love to grab coffee!

Announcement: Orchestra SAO is GA

SAO is now enabled for all accounts. This means you can use it irrespective of if you are an enterprise, scale-up, or even a free tier customer.

dbt just got easier.

Try it here

SAO is an Orchestra-managed python package built for dbt Core™ that allows users to store and use the state of models. This helps to orchestrate dbt Core™ more intelligently and only run models when certain conditions are met.

With Orchestra SAO, Orchestra users can:

• Save cost and speed-up runs: the state of dbt models is stored using source_freshness checks which means models are skipped if there is no new data and no code has changed

• Stop wasting time tagging models: adding build_after configurations allow for declarative scheduling. There is no need to manual tagging

• Move to real-time: dbt state-aware can run every 10 or 5 minutes, enabling close-to-realtime patterns with leading ELT tools like Estuary

Users of dbt do not need to upgrade to a proprietary engine. Orchestra leverages the Sao Paolo repo. Simply enable Orchestra SAO with one line of code:

tasks:
      execute_dbt:
        integration: DBT_CORE
        integration_job: DBT_CORE_EXECUTE
        parameters:
          commands: dbt  build
          package_manager: PIP
          python_version: ‘3.12’
          use_state_orchestration: true // <-- this line
.
.
.

Some of the biggest and most advanced data teams are already leveraging State-Aware Orchestra in Orchesta. Experian use Orchestra State-Aware Orchestration to power dozens of analysts across multiple domains, to easily build SQL models powering marketing analytics.

Orchestra Product Features

• NEW Assets and Lineage - you can update Assets via API to create a banging context layer

• NEW Check-out our new case study with FEELD - how the dating app powers ML and AI workflows with Orchestra

• NEW We run dbt debug when validating an orchestra dbt connection now which is pretty great!!

• NEW Custom Webhook Alerts (send custom webhook payloads to any monitoring tool e.g. Datadog)

• NEW Postgres Sensor enabled (trigger a pipeline whenever something happens in Postgres)

• NEW trigger on any condition (link)

• Trigger an Orchestra Pipeline as a task (link)

• Scaling sequential Tasks in the MetaEngine - one config, infinite possibilities. Metadata-driven frameworks in ADF are a thing of the past!

• Large Task Outputs - you can now pass data between tasks up to many Megabytes

• Force Cancel - you can force cancel any task, pushing it into a cancelled state

• Datadog integration

• Omni Integration

• Pipeline run concurrency is live! Read more here

• Call AWS Bedrock as part of an Orchestra Pipeline

• Monitor your Estuary Syncs from Orchestra (read more here)

• MCP Video is live. This is the only MCP you need or API you need to reliably fix your data pipelines automatically with AI.

• You can now run claude agents in Orchestra. These can automate anything, especially things you can design as code submission tasks.

• AI Assistant is in Orchestra too - ask our assistant questions without having to leave to the docs!

• Released our EKS operator - you can now trigger and monitor flows on Kubernetes in AWS

• UI RESKIN! DARK MODE AND LIGHT MODE! TELL YOUR FRIENDS!

• Improved Docs Site — CHECK OUT OUR DOCS AND ASK IT QUESTIONS

• Workspaces - say goodbye to multiple airflow instances

• Improved Lineage Filtering

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Medium 🧠

🧠 5 Data Engineering Problems I See In Almost Every Production System (link)

🧠 Iceberg Interoperability Between Snowflake and Databricks (link)

🧠 Databricks Lakeflow ✨ Spark This Way 🛣️ (link)

🧠 How to Effectively Run Many Claude Code Sessions in Parallel (link)

🧠 Zero-Copy Connectors: Real-Time SAP Data in Snowflake Without a Single ETL Pipeline (link)

🧠 From Silos to Service Topology: Why Netflix Built a Real-Time Service Map (link)

🧠 Exploring Bidirectional Data Movement Patterns Between Snowflake and Postgres (link)

🧠 Real-time Change Data Capture from Aurora PostgreSQL to Snowflake with Openflow (link)

LinkedIn 🕴

🕴 The AI Rush Is Making Everyone Feel Behind (link)

🕴 Why AI Agents Will Become the Biggest Consumers of Data (link)

🕴 The Biggest Problem in Data Engineering Isn’t Technical (link)

🕴 Why Databricks’ Iceberg Story Raises Serious Concerns (link)

🕴 Databricks Is Calling It Open. Engineers Should Look Closer (link)

🕴 AI Agents Could Make Your Data Warehouse Bill Explode (link)

🕴 How Data Leaders Are Actually Using Summit in 2026 (link)

News 📰

📰 Snowflake Explodes 37% on $6 Billion Amazon Deal as CEO Calls Q1 an AI “Inflection Point”… Read More

📰 Snowflake Deepens AWS Tie-Up As AI Data War With Databricks Escalates… Read More

📰 Snowflake Announces Intent to Acquire Natoma, Providing Secure Connectivity For The Agentic Enterprise… Read More

📰 Snowflake’s stock price just soared to a 2026 high thanks to AI. So what happened to the SaaSpocalypse?… Read More

📰 Daloopa raises $47m to fix AI’s financial data problem… Read More

YouTube and Podcast 🎥

Editor’s Pick

🎥 The Semantic Model Became the Product — Here’s Why Power BI Is Changing (Video)

🎥 Power BI Desktop Just Got Version History 🤯 (Video)

🎥 Top 10 Data Orchestration Tools in 2026 | Orchestration Tools Completely broken down (Video)

🎥 How to Build a Production ELT Pipeline in 5 Minutes | Orchestra Tutorial (Video)

Special 💫

💫 Data Engineering Weekly #271 (link)

💫 Kafka Share Groups and Parallelizing Consumption — Part 1: Tuning max.poll.records (link)

💫 Kafka Share Groups and Parallelizing Consumption - Part 2: Producer Batches and share.acquire.mode (link)

Jobs 💼

💼 Data Engineer, Integrations & Data Platform at Trially AI (link)

💼 Data Engineer / Analytics Engineer at Gridmatic (link)

💼 Analytics Engineer at Egnyte (link)

💼 Staff Analytics Engineer at Fitness Passport

💼 Sr Analytics Engineer at Ironclad (link)

Run dbt models cheaply and easily with state?

If you’re looking for an easy way to run your dbt core models, look no further than Orchestra. Orchestra gives you state-aware orchestration out the box, which can reduce your dbt core costs, and make scheduling much easier!

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