In this Data on the Move discussion, Darren and Krishna discuss Komprise Transparent File Tables and the importance of delivering the right unstructured data to AI and analytics..
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Data on the Move: Komprise Transparent File Tables
In this episode of Data on the Move, Komprise Co-founder and COO Krishna Subramanian and Darren Cunningham discuss Komprise Transparent File Tables.
Read the press release
Komprise Transparent File Tables expose a structured view of enterprise unstructured data to leading AI, business intelligence and analytics platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks. With Komprise, data engineers, data scientists and analysts can query and use unstructured data as an Apache Iceberg table in their familiar environment while avoiding massive costs for large-scale data movement.
Learn more about Komprise Transparent File Tables
Transparent File Tables FAQs
What are Komprise Transparent File Tables?
Transparent File Tables are a Komprise capability that makes petabytes of unstructured file and object data directly queryable inside data lakehouses like Snowflake and Databricks, without moving any files. Komprise loads the Global Metadatabase schema once into the lakehouse as a native table. From that point, any authorized data team user can see, query, and join unstructured data with other tables, just as they would with any structured dataset. When AI needs to run on a specific subset of that data, Komprise intelligently ingests only those files. The rest stays exactly where it lives.
Why can’t data lakehouses access unstructured data today?
Unstructured data makes up 80% of the enterprise data footprint, but only 1% of it has ever been analyzed by a data lakehouse or AI system. The barrier is practical: unstructured data sits on file storage like NAS systems, piling up in petabytes and billions of files. Moving all of it into a lakehouse before analyzing it is too time-consuming and expensive to be viable at that scale. Data teams have been left without access to the majority of their organization’s data because no practical bridge existed between file storage and the analytics environments they work in. Transparent File Tables are designed to be that bridge.
How does the Global Metadatabase make Transparent File Tables possible?
Komprise has been building a rich schema for unstructured data since the beginning. The Global Metadatabase captures file system metadata, industry-specific metadata extracted by KAPPA data services, and sensitive data labels applied by Smart Data Workflows. That schema gives unstructured data the context it needs to be queryable: not just file names and sizes, but attributes like imaging modality, project codes, data classification, and access patterns. Transparent File Tables expose this schema directly as a table in Snowflake or Databricks, so data teams are not just seeing raw file listings. They are seeing structured, contextually rich metadata they can filter, join, and act on.
What can data teams do once Transparent File Tables are loaded into their lakehouse?
Data teams can query unstructured file data alongside any other table in their lakehouse environment. They can filter by metadata attributes to identify exactly which files are relevant to a specific AI or analytics use case, join unstructured file records with structured business data, and trigger targeted ingestion of only the files they need. This means the IT team and the data team can finally work from the same view of the organization’s full data estate, without the storage team having to migrate data and without the data team having to wait.
Which organizations are using Transparent File Tables today?
Early adoption is strongest in pharmaceutical, life sciences, and genomics, where organizations manage large volumes of research files, imaging data, and experimental datasets that have historically been invisible to data teams. In these environments, the ability to join unstructured research data with structured clinical or operational data without a migration project is directly valuable for AI model development and analytics. Any Komprise customer whose data team wants to start working with their unstructured data can reach out to Komprise to get started.