In the past, to participate in Snowflake Data Marketplace, data providers either needed to use Snowflake as their primary data store or get Snowflake accounts and load or map their data to it. Even though this solution works well, it takes time and requires complex data engineering work to set up. Snowflake recently rolled out a new feature called external functions, which may help potential data enrichment providers overcome this problem.
How to quickly become a Snowflake data marketplace provider if you don't use Snowflake natively?
July 01, 2020 | Article
The How: Leverage existing REST APIs
External functions capability allows data providers to call their own APIs on behalf of their customers, from a Snowflake account in the consumer’s region, and to share the resulting data to the customer’s Snowflake account. Leveraging their REST API enables data providers to join the Snowflake data marketplace quickly and fulfill requests from consumers in any Snowflake cloud or region immediately. A step-by-step example and how to adapt this approach to different APIs is given in the Snowflake blog.
The Why: Customer Benefits
This approach is advantageous to the customers in the following ways:
- It eliminates significant costs incurred by each consumer while loading data into Snowflake through other methods
- It enables consumers to get more data more quickly from the provider, thereby reducing latency and increasing time-to-value.
- It requires no changes for the consumers if the provider becomes Snowflake-native over time.
- It helps consumers to test-drive and get the feel of new data enrichment services quickly.
- It allows data consumers to access data and data services within Snowflake regardless of their Snowflake region.
- It removes costs incurred by each consumer to develop and operate their own process to call the provider’s APIs from their database.
If you are a data provider with a data enrichment API, and you want to participate in Snowflake Data Marketplace, this approach may be an excellent way to get there by leveraging your existing API.
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