James Rowland-Jones & Russell Spitzer, Snowflake | Snowflake Summit 2026

In this interview from Snowflake Summit 2026 in San Francisco, Russell Spitzer, principal engineer at Snowflake, joins James Rowland-Jones, director of product management at Snowflake, to talk with theCUBE's Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight about how Apache Iceberg has matured into the foundation for open, interoperable data access in the AI era. Rowland-Jones frames "interoperability without compromise" as a full-stack architecture — spanning from foundational data storage up through how organizations share and consume data across teams and systems. Spitzer traces the inflection point from Snowflake Summit 2022, when almost no one in the audience had heard of Apache Iceberg, to today, when the format has become the de facto standard. The shift unlocks a no-copy model: organizations can attach Snowflake directly to petabytes of existing data lake storage and begin processing it immediately, eliminating ingestion overhead and simplifying governance challenges like managing GDPR compliance across duplicated systems. The conversation also explores how Apache Polaris and Horizon complement rather than compete with each other — Polaris as the open-source core for self-managed deployments, Horizon as the fully managed service built on that same foundation. Rowland-Jones underscores that Snowflake develops capabilities in Polaris and graduates them into Horizon, giving enterprises the assurance of an open core even inside a managed service. Spitzer previews Open Semantic Interchange, a new community project aimed at standardizing how business context and ontologies are exchanged so agents can move beyond table names and identifiers to understand how an organization actually operates. Both guests agree this shift is elevating data engineers rather than replacing them, as the discipline moves from writing pipelines and SQL toward designing data products, evaluating AI-generated outputs and aligning data strategy with business outcomes. From resolving years of format confusion to building the semantic layer that agentic AI will depend on, Spitzer and Rowland-Jones outline why open, interoperable infrastructure is the only viable foundation for enterprise intelligence at scale. Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/ Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/ Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/ 00:00 - Intro 00:06 - Advancing Data Ecosystems: From Snowflake Innovations to AI Interoperability and Apache Iceberg 02:19 - Snowflake's Journey with Iceberg 05:22 - Accessing Data without Copies 09:48 - Enhancing Interoperability 12:22 - Future Directions for Data Integration 16:23 - Elevating Data Engineers 18:55 - Clarifying Market Dynamics and Future Innovations #theCUBE #SnowflakeSummit #theCUBEresearch #Snowflake #ApacheIceberg #DataCloud