This document outlines the design and implementation of a Snowflake-native system for processing and generating vector embeddings using Python UDFs. It replaced a distributed EC2-based solution, reduced operational overhead, and enabled scalable, SQL-driven vector workflows within our analytics platform.
Our team needed to perform operations on embedding vectors (e.g., similarity scoring, normalization, distance calculations) using billions of records stored in our Snowflake database.
However, the existing workflow—relying on distributed Python scripts running on EC2 and ingesting CSVs from S3—was operationally brittle, inefficient, and difficult to maintain.