Announcing Hasura integration with Snowflake: Empowering developers with effortless data APIs

We are excited to announce the GA release of Hasura support for Snowflake. Together, Hasura and Snowflake accelerate the development cycle for data-intensive applications by drastically reducing the effort required to create a data API that acts as the self-service data access layer for application developers and other data consumers.

“Hasura enabled us to migrate quickly and easily from PostgreSQL to Snowflake, which is a more performant and scalable datastore for serving the APIs and dashboards in our space utilization and analytics platform. Rebuilding the API layer with Hasura took practically no time, allowing our team to focus the migration efforts on building a better customer experience on our new data backend.”
– Matt MacGillivray, Co-Founder and VP, R&D of Innerspace

Our mission has always been to make data access fast, secure, and scalable for developers, and this new integration allows developers to build applications and services on Snowflake 10x faster.

With Hasura support for Snowflake, you can now connect your Snowflake data warehouse to Hasura and instantly get GraphQL and REST APIs for your data. This integration makes it incredibly simple to build applications on top of Snowflake, taking advantage of its elasticity, performance, and scalability. Hasura is a Data API Platform that removes the tedious bits of building and operating production data APIs – reducing cost, complexity, and time to market.

6 Key features

1. Instant GraphQL and REST APIs: Connect your Snowflake data warehouse and instantly get GraphQL or REST APIs to query your data.
2. Role-based access control: Secure your data with Hasura's fine-grained, role-based access control system.
3. Unified data access: Combine your Snowflake data with other databases, REST endpoints, and GraphQL services in a single, unified API.
4. High-performance SQL: Hasura's powerful query engine optimizes your GraphQL queries for efficient, high-performance data access.
5. User-defined functions: The Hasura GraphQL API can be configured to track Snowflake user-defined functions, unlocking more use cases that leverage the best features of Snowflake, such as AI/ML workflows in Snowpark.
6. Easy to get started: Use Hasura Cloud to start using Snowflake with Hasura in just a few minutes, without any additional setup or infrastructure changes.

With the Hasura Data Connector for Snowflake, developers can rapidly build multi-tenant mobile/web applications directly on Snowflake Data Cloud, without spending countless hours writing (and securing, tuning, hardening, etc) the APIs required to serve the data to the frontend. This could be for internal or external applications, for example:

• Real-time analytics dashboards: Build live analytics dashboards to visualize and monitor key business metrics from Snowflake
• Personalized customer experiences: Create personalized customer experiences by combining Snowflake's powerful data processing capabilities with Hasura's real-time data access, allowing you to tailor content and recommendations based on customer behavior and preferences.
• IoT and data streaming: Integrate Snowflake's data ingestion and processing capabilities with Hasura's real-time subscriptions to power IoT applications and data streaming solutions.
• Omnichannel retail: Provide a seamless, unified shopping experience across multiple channels by connecting Snowflake's centralized data warehouse to Hasura's GraphQL API, allowing you to manage inventory, pricing, and promotions in real-time.
• Supply chain optimization: Improve supply chain efficiency by connecting Snowflake's data analytics capabilities to Hasura's real-time API, enabling instant insights and adjustments based on real-time data.
• Data-driven marketing: Empower your marketing teams with real-time access to customer data from Snowflake, enabling personalized marketing campaigns and improved targeting.

One of the standout features of Snowflake is its support for User-Defined Functions (UDFs), which allow you to create custom functions using SQL expressions and the languages supported by Snowflake.

UDFs are incredibly powerful, enabling complex computations that would otherwise be difficult or impossible with standard SQL. UDFs enable you to define custom functions using SQL or JavaScript, encapsulating complex logic and computations that go beyond the capabilities of traditional SQL queries.

With Hasura's Snowflake support, you can now expose UDFs via GraphQL APIs. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities. For example, you can create a UDF in Snowflake to calculate the average order value for a customer, and then expose this function via a GraphQL API in Hasura. Learn more about Hasura’s support for Snowflake UDFs here.

The Hasura engine uses a JIT compiler approach to translate an inbound GraphQL query into the SQL query that is executed on Snowflake. The Hasura connector for Snowflake uses cutting-edge SQL query optimization techniques that are specifically tailored for Snowflake. This ensures that the Hasura-generated API is blazing fast out of the box – no SQL expertise needed.

We meticulously analyzed the performance bottlenecks that arise when querying large datasets with complex relationships and permissions. By leveraging the unique features of Snowflake, we have fine-tuned the query execution pipeline, resulting in remarkable performance improvements.

With our optimized SQL queries, you'll experience significant reductions in query execution time, for large and small datasets. Hasura on Snowflake empowers you to retrieve precisely the data you need, minimizing unnecessary data transfer and accelerating your application's responsiveness.

Say goodbye to long waits and hello to lightning-fast data access.

The GA release of Hasura support for Snowflake marks a significant milestone in empowering organizations to leverage the power of real-time data and effortlessly generate applications from their Snowflake data. This integration brings together the strengths of Hasura's GraphQL API platform and Snowflake's cloud data platform, unlocking a multitude of business use cases and offering a range of benefits to organizations.

By seamlessly integrating Snowflake's powerful data processing capabilities with Hasura's real-time data access and application generation, organizations can accelerate their development cycle and reduce the effort required to create data APIs. This allows developers and other data consumers to focus on building exceptional customer experiences and driving innovation, rather than spending valuable time on API development.

To get started with Hasura and Snowflake, comprehensive documentation, guides, examples, and quickstarts are available to support developers in their journey. By signing up for Hasura Cloud and connecting their Snowflake data warehouse, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data and embark on a path of building innovative, data-driven applications.

Happy building! 🚀🎉

To help you get started, we've prepared detailed documentation, guides, and examples:

• Getting Started with Hasura and Snowflake
• Snowflake Quickstart
• Securing Your Snowflake Data with Hasura
• Snowflake Integration Video
• Snowflake Blog Post
• Snowflake Sample App

We can't wait to see the amazing applications you'll build using Hasura and Snowflake. Get started today by signing up for Hasura Cloud and connecting your Snowflake data warehouse.

If you have any questions or need assistance, feel free to reach out to our team on Discord or GitHub.