Let's be honest: data collaboration between companies is a minefield. Everyone wants the insight, but nobody wants the liability. And as analytics apps become more embedded, personalized, and monetized, that tension just gets worse. 

The good news? There's a solution. The better news? At Seek, we didn't just adopt Snowflake's Clean Room feature set - we engineered a clean-room-style collaboration framework purpose-built for scalable app development. 

And that subtle distinction matters more than it might seem. 

The Clean Room Promise (and its limits) 

On paper, Snowflake Clean Rooms offer a powerful concept: two or more parties define join logic, enforce strict access rules, and analyze overlapping data - without exposing the sensitive underlying rows. Think media attribution, retail partner performance, supply chain visibility. All use cases where insight matters more than raw data access. 

And to be clear - Snowflake's implementation is impressive. Their primitives (hashed joins, policy SQL, secure data sharing) are solid building blocks for governed collaboration. 

But in practice, Clean Rooms are more infrastructure than solution. 

• They give you the bricks, not the blueprint. 

• They require coordination across schema, governance, and logic. 

• And they weren't designed with rapid, repeatable application development in mind. 

This is where our needs diverged. We weren't just looking to enable controlled queries - we needed to power secure, multi-tenant apps that evolve with users. 

What We Built at Seek: Clean Rooms Delivered as a Service 

At Seek, we support analytics apps across dozens of data providers, industries, and partner configurations - all powered by shared Snowflake infrastructure. 

Rather than forcing every provider to rebuild logic in their own Clean Room, we've: 

• Standardized join protocols (like hashed ID maps and shared business keys) while giving each provider control over what gets exposed and to whom. 

• Embedded governance directly into the app layer - column-level visibility, filter enforcement, row-level security - so that enforcement happens before a query ever hits a partner's data. 

• Wrapped all of it in a developer experience that treats these controls not as ad hoc setups, but as reusable modules: "this view is available to this partner, using this logic, under these rules." 

In other words, instead of sending someone off to assemble their own Clean Room, we provide a secure, pre-wired workspace where clean-room principles are already baked in. 

Why This Matters: Secure Apps, Not Just Queries 

Snowflake Clean Rooms were designed for predefined query sets - media mix models, overlap calculations, aggregated metrics. That's useful. But analytics apps demand more: 

• Dynamic filters per end user 

• Multi-tenant logic 

• Incremental computation 

• Auditability across interactions 

• UI-driven data exploration with enforced boundaries 

These aren't solved with static join logic or policy SQL. They require app-layer semantics - a clean-room philosophy embedded in every component: tables, views, permissions, metadata, even UI scaffolding. 

Our goal isn't just to prevent data leakage. It's to enable ongoing collaboration between partners - co-developed logic, shared feedback loops, and real-time insight generation - while keeping raw data off-limits. 

What We've Learned 

We've been building this model for years, and here's the real takeaway: Clean Rooms aren't just a feature. They're an operating model. 

Whether you use Snowflake's built-in toolkit or build your own like we did, the principles are the same: 

• Define collaboration at the logic layer, not the data layer. 

• Assume zero trust by default. 

• Design for reusability across apps, not just queries. 

• Wrap your security in developer ergonomics - or it won't get used. 

And most importantly, recognize that governed collaboration is no longer optional. If you're building apps on partner data, this isn't a luxury - it's table stakes.  

TL;DR 

Snowflake Clean Rooms offer a solid foundation for secure, governed data collaboration. 

At Seek, we took that idea further - building an app-native, reusable clean-room infrastructure that powers multi-tenant analytics without exposing raw partner data. 

The secret isn't just in the joins or the policies. It's in productizing the governance model so every partner app inherits it by design, not by accident. 

We didn't adopt Clean Rooms. We engineered the platform others wish they had - where governed collaboration isn't a feature, it's the foundation. 

By Ryan Johnson, CTO at Seek