Different Snowflake Connectors and Explanation

  • Post author:
  • Post last modified:February 24, 2020
  • Post category:Snowflake
  • Reading time:9 mins read

A Snowflake cloud data warehouse supports connection from many leading programming languages. You can use these connectors and drivers to take advantage of Snowflake’s unique capabilities and features. Snowflake supports many third-party and native connectors. In this article, we will check different Snowflake connectors, drivers and third-party tools.

Different Snowflake Connectors

Following is a list of different connectors and drivers available in Snowflake.

Now, let us check these connectors and tools in brief.

SnowSQL – Snowflake Command Line Interface

SnowSQL is a Python based command line interface to connect Snowflake from Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

You can use SnowSQL to execute queries such as DML and DDL operations. This interface also provides the command suggestions when you type keywords.

For more information, read – Snowsql Command Line Options and Examples

Snowflake Connector for Python

Snowflake provides native Python connector for Snowflake. The Python connector is a pure Python package distributed through PyPI and released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

The connector is a pure python package that can be used to connect your application to the cloud data warehouse. The connector supports all standard operations such as, query execution, loading, accessing data from external source (S3), and many more.

For more details, read – How to use Snowflake Python Connector and Example

Snowflake Connector for Spark

The Snowflake Connector for Spark enables using Snowflake as an Apache Spark data source, similar to other data sources (PostgreSQL, HDFS, S3, etc.). The connector supports bi-directional data movement between a Snowflake cluster and a Spark cluster.

You can use the Spark connector to perform operations such as reading and writing. For example, you can use the spark connector to populate Spark dataFrame and write Spark dataFrame to Snowflake table.

The best part about Spark connector is, it applies predicate and query pushdown by capturing and analyzing the Spark logical plans for SQL operations. When the data source is Snowflake, the operations are translated into a SQL query and then executed in Snowflake to improve performance.

Don’t forget to include the Snowflake Spark Connector and JDBC Connector .jar files in your CLASSPATH environment variable. Otherwise, you will not be able to use Spark Connector.

Related Article,

Go Snowflake Driver

You can use Go Snowflake driver to integrate your Go application to the Snowflake data warehouse.

The Go Snowflake driver supports limited operations. The operations such as PUT and GET are not supported. You can also use SnowSQL CLI or JDBC driver to connect to Snowflake using Go program.

Snowflake Connector for Kafka

The Snowflake Connector for Kafka reads data from one or more Apache Kafka topics and loads the data into a Snowflake table. The Kafka connector is designed to run in a Kafka Connect cluster.

For more information, read official document.

Node.js Driver

The Node.js diver is written in pure Java script and provides a native asynchronous Node.js interface to Snowflake.

You can use this driver to perform operations such as connect to Snowflake, execute DDL/DML functions, consume results and at last terminate results.

Snowflake .NET Driver

The Snowflake .NET driver provides an interface to the Microsoft .NET open source software framework for developing applications. The driver supports using Visual Studio 2017 to develop .NET applications.

The .NET driver supports limited operations. The operations such as PUT and GET are not supported. You can also use SnowSQL CLI or JDBC driver instead.

Snowflake JDBC Driver

Snowflake provides a JDBC type 4 driver that supports the core JDBC functionality. You can use the JDBC driver on a 64-bit environment and requires Java 1.8.

You can use this JDBC driver with most tools and programming language that supports JDBC functionality. For example, use it in Java, Python, etc.

Go through official document for more details.

Related Articles,

Snowflake ODBC Driver

Snowflake provides a driver for connecting to Snowflake using ODBC-based client applications. You can use the ODBC driver with clients such as SQL clients.

Snowflake provides the OS specific ODBC drivers. You can download it from the Snowflake official download link.

Snowflake repository link – https://docs.snowflake.net/manuals/user-guide/snowflake-client-repository.html

Related Articles,

SnowCD – Snowflake Connectivity Diagnostic Tool

SnowCD (i.e. Snowflake Connectivity Diagnostic Tool) helps users to diagnose and troubleshoot their network connection to Snowflake.

For more information on SnowCD – read official document.

Hope this helps 🙂

Tags: , , ,