The CData ODBC Driver for Snowflake provides ODBC-compliant access to real-time data from Snowflake, allowing interaction with Snowflake data in a broad range of business intelligence, reporting, and extract, transform and load (ETL) applications, as well as directly using conventional SQL queries.

Because of the advanced data processing included within the driver, the CData ODBC drivers provide unrivaled speed when working with live Snowflake data in Alteryx Designer.

When you send complicated SQL queries from Alteryx to Snowflake, the driver sends supported SQL operations straight to Snowflake and uses the integrated SQL engine to handle unsupported actions (typically SQL operations and JOIN functions) client-side.

Users can display and examine Snowflake data leveraging native Alteryx data field formats with built-in flexible metadata queries.

What Snowflake Offers

Snowflake is a fully managed (software as a service) (SaaS) that was established in 2012 to provide a centralized platform for managing and accessing different aspects of data, including warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, safe exchange and usage of real-time / shared data and data application development.

To meet the demanding requirements of expanding companies, Snowflake includes out-of-the-box capabilities such as storage and compute partitioning, on-the-fly scaling computation, sharing data, data replication, and third-party tool support. 

What Alteryx Offers

Alteryx is a platform for data operations automation to make them more efficient and faster. It gathers, prepares, and combines data that would otherwise take too long or be difficult to integrate with other technologies.

Alteryx can simplify or automate data operations by providing solutions to complicated business queries. This helps save time and helps to avoid mistakes that may have arisen if the procedure had been carried out manually.

Connecting Alteryx to Snowflake

Leveraging input and output tools is the most direct link to Snowflake data. The sole need is for an ODBC connection to be established to a particular Snowflake web server. It allows users to read, write, create, and remove data tables after configuring ODBC and providing Snowflake credentials.

They can also connect to a database and easily alter the data without needing to fetch and push data from Snowflake using the "In-Database" features.

Users benefit from increased visibility and access to their data thanks to the Snowflake/Alteryx connection. The Alteryx platform eliminates the need for SQL knowledge, allowing any user to analyze and handle data.

The process for connecting the two platforms is as follows:

• Start by configuring an ODBC connection
• Configure a Snowflake JWT
• Set the Snowflake Bulk Connection to write data

For more details, check out the Snowflake Portal to get minute details on the process.

You can complete your Alteryx-Snowflake connection using two tools. They include:

1. The Output Data Tool for The Standard Workflow Processing

With this process, you will need to start by reviewing that you can only write data with the Snowflake Bulk loader and that after writing data to the new output, the Snowflake Bulk loader removes the written data from the S3 bucket.

The process follows these steps:

• Start by configuring an ODBC connection
• Configure a Snowflake JWT
• Set the Snowflake Bulk Connection to write data.

You can then move on to the methods for staging data with Snowflake Bulk Connection.

2. Connect In-DB Tool and Data Stream in Tool for In-Database workflow processing

This process allows you to create a connection between in-database connections in a workflow and use the tool to connect to a new or existing connection. The steps break down as follows:

• Start by configuring the tool
• Add a new in-DB connection or use an existing one.

To learn more, check out Manage In-DB connections by Alteryx.

Conclusion

If you want to get more out of your data, the answer is a resounding yes! There is much to be gained from analyzing data easily and in real-time.

Snowflake and Alteryx work together to provide scalable power for advanced analytics. Enterprises can exploit performance and parallelism by executing comprehensive, predictive, and spatial analytics to quickly examine huge volumes of data inside a Snowflake environment using the connection. Alteryx's drag-and-drop interface also makes executing sophisticated analyses quick and simple.