The Snowflake Data Marketplace facilitates business Users and data Engineers find and use their Snowflake accounts’ third-party data sets for querying. Enterprises can create new markets, reach newer customers for greater revenue, leveraging capabilities right from free data offers, subscription data to data services with value add to loads of Snowflake consumers.
How does Snowsight help here?
Snowsight is an innovative analytics UI for advanced, delightful analyst experience. It helps Analysts, data consumers and data engineers explore data, SQL query auto-completion, disparate values-based iterations for queries using filters.
Getting started briefly with Snowflake Data Marketplace
External data helps companies improve business decision-making through enhanced or augmented internal datasets. However, the process of sourcing quality external data can be expensive.This poses a challenge for organizations trying to expand their use of external data. On the contrary, it lays the onus on data consumers. In addition, it also reduces the market potential for data providers.
Snowflake Data Marketplace – the Ideal Solution
Snowflake Data Marketplace solves this problem, providing data consumers a centralized marketplace. Data consumers can discover and access quality datasets without having to go through multiple data transformation steps that a traditional marketplace mandates.
Snowflake Data Marketplace provides live access to ready-to-query data. The Snowflake Data Marketplace is a platform where you can connect data providers with consumers that utilizes Snowflake Secure Data Sharing. You can discover and access a variety of third-party data and have those datasets available directly in your Snowflake account to query and join it with your own data.
A Sneak Peek into Snowflake Data Marketplace
The Snowflake Data Marketplace leverages the new Snowflake web interface.
Once you log in to your Snowflake account, click the Data Marketplace button, which opens a new tab.
After you join the Snowflake Data Marketplace, you can be both, a Data Consumer and also a Data provider. Any Data Provider will be able to publish data listings for free-to-use datasets and share live datasets securely. Any Data Consumer will be able to discover and test third party data sources and have data continuously updated.
Standardized Vs Personalized Data Listings
The Snowflake Data Marketplace offers two types of data listings, Standard Data Listings and Personalized Data Listings. Once published, both types of listings are displayed to consumers in the selected regions. The key difference between standard and personalized listings is the ability to access the data share. Personalized listings allow you to control which consumers can access the data.
A standard listing provides instant access to a published data set. To access the data consumers need to click Get Data button which allows you to create a Database with this dataset and will be added to Databases available. This can be done only by the Account Admin role.
A personalized listing allows customers to request specific data sets. To access data from a personalized listing, consumers must submit a request by clicking the Request button, and provide their contact information. Once a request is submitted, the data provider is notified. The provider then contacts the consumer after which a personalized data set is created and shared with the consumer.
Getting Started with Snowsight
Overview of Snowsight
Snowsight is an advanced Analytics User Interface for Users of Snowflake Cloud Data Platform. Snowsight UI is designed for Business Users, Analysts, and Data Engineers known for its sheer ease-of-use features. With Snowsight,
- It is a breeze to quickly write queries, using its SQL autocomplete and a schema browser
- The new, advanced sharing and collaboration platform of Snowsight is its other plus
- The best thing about Snowsight for data Engineers are the Charts and Dashboards for Snowflake data
- This feature makes data interpretation, visualization, search and data sharing across the Enterprise seem seamless
Snowsight in Detail
Snowsight is a platform that allows you to visualize data with the pre-provided charts. It enables greater productivity through a new schema browser that helps you explore your data, auto-completion for SQL queries, and filters that make it easier to iterate with different values for queries. Click on Preview App , which opens the new web interface in a separate tab or window where you can perform these operations.
The Worksheet Screen
The following is a worksheet screen where you can query any database using SQL queries. The results of the query will be available under Results tab. The Results tab displays information such as number of rows, time taken to display the result, name of each column with statistics like Filled/empty meters, Histograms and Frequency Distribution. Additionally, you can also apply filters to the table and view the corresponding results.
The session context can be selected, i.e. the current role, warehouse, and database for the User session for each worksheet. You can create and share worksheets, add worksheet to a dashboard and open previous versions of a worksheet as well.
The Schema Tab
The schema tab enables Users to explore the schemas, tables, views, and other objects in the current database that are accessible by the current session role. It displays details of each table including column names and data types as well as the number of rows. Click the Preview button at the top of a table details area to open a preview of the table data. Refer to the following screen:
The Chart Pane
The Chart pane helps you transform query results into visualizations. They communicate logical relationships thereby leading to more informed decision-making. They enable you to quickly identify and understand patterns and outliers in data.
The charts available in Snowsight are,
- Bar charts
- Line charts
- Scatterplots
- Heat grids
- Scorecards
Refer to the following screen:
When a query returns results, the worksheet automatically creates a chart based on this result. One can easily group numbers and dates by the bucketing feature.
Charts can bucket by date, week, month, and year for date columns and by integer values for numeric columns.
Aggregation functions in Charts
Charts use aggregation functions to determine a single value from multiple data points. These functions are,
- Average
- Count
- Minimum
- Maximum
- Median
- Mode
- Sum
Dashboards
Dashboards are a combination of worksheets displaying the storyline and status, based on the charts created. It consists of any number of tiles where each tile represents a worksheet.
One can share dashboards and worksheets to other Snowflake accounts through configured permissions.
What more is still needed from Snowsight?
Since Snowsight is a preview feature, it requires a few improvisations:
- Increasing the chart types
- Enable creating multiple charts from a single worksheet
- Availability of filter option in the charts
- Colour customization etc.
Snowflake allows visualization of any data that is either sourced from within snowflake or from external sources, into Snowflake, without the need for a BI tool. A large number of datasets are available in various categories under Data Marketplace, which include data from Factset, SafeGraph, Data.world, and more, that can be used by all Snowflake customers.
To know more about our cloud expertise, write to us at analytics@ameexusa.com
