What Free Tools Pair Well With The Snowflake AI Data Cloud?

Using 3rd party tooling is essential if you’re a Snowflake AI Data Cloud customer. Getting your data into Snowflake, creating analytics applications from the data, and even ensuring your Snowflake account runs smoothly all require some sort of tool. The problem is that tools cost money. Luckily, users can utilize many fantastic, safe, free-use, and open-source applications with Snowflake.

In this blog, we’ll review some of the best free tools for use with Snowflake Data Cloud, what they can do for you, and how to use them without breaking the bank.

Best Free Tools for Snowflake Data Cloud

phData Advisor Tool

Snowflake has many great features for your account’s security, performance, and general operations. They also continuously develop new features that can be hard to keep up with if you don’t have an expert to help you navigate them. That’s why phData created the Advisor Tool. It’s almost as good as having one of the Snowflake experts at phData looking at your account to ensure you’re utilizing it to its full potential.

Advisor tool scans your account and creates a dashboard of checks to quickly and easily identify opportunities to improve the configuration, security, performance, and efficiency of your Snowflake environment.

The Advisor tool comes with a pre-configured set of checks to identify opportunities and provide recommendations that ensure your Snowflake environment is following best practices and industry standards across a variety of categories, including:

Configuration Best Practices
Security Enhancements
Operational Risks
Performance Optimization
Resource Utilization
Environment Scale and Capacity

Advisor can be installed through a Native App in Snowflake and requires a minimum setup that can be done in about 10 minutes.

phData Access Tool

Snowflake uses the role-based access control (RBAC) model, a fantastic way to control access to objects and privileges in your account based on the user’s role at your company. Using RBAC involves a complex hierarchy of functional and access roles that can be challenging to visualize.

The Access Tool was created to help you navigate RBAC and your entire Snowflake account by scanning and collecting your account’s metadata to answer questions related to:

Warehouse, table, and schema user access
Roles needed for a particular dataset
Object ownership
Active users
Whether your information architecture is being followed

Like the Advisor tool, the Access tool is available on the Snowflake Marketplace as a Native App and doesn’t require much to get it up and running and creating reports for you.

Apache Airflow

Airflow is an open-source ETL software that is very useful when paired with Snowflake. Airflow uses Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to represent workflows as tasks with defined dependencies. The DAGs can then be scheduled to run at specific intervals or triggered when an event occurs. It even offers a user-friendly interface to visualize the pipelines and monitor progress. Airflow is entirely in Python, so it’s relatively easy for those with some Python experience to get started using it.

dbt Core

Another great open-source tool for transformations is dbt Core. While dbt Cloud is the more robust paid version of dbt, it all started with this command line tool that is still worth it for those who don’t want to buy the cloud version yet. dbt offers a SQL-first transformation workflow that lets teams build data transformation pipelines while following software engineering best practices like CI/CD, modularity, and documentation.

By leveraging version control, testing, and documentation features, dbt Core enables teams to ensure data quality and consistency across their pipelines while integrating seamlessly with modern data warehouses.

Streamlit

Streamlit is another fantastic open-source tool that allows you to create and share web apps for data science and machine learning while using Snowflake’s power. Snowflake has integrated the Streamlit library to create apps from your data without your data ever leaving Snowflake’s security.

Steamlit apps can be deployed directly in Snowflake, which enables you to utilize many Snowflake features, such as RBAC access for the apps, using your account’s computing resources, and integrating them with Snowpark.

Best (Basically) Free Tools for Snowflake Data Cloud

The two free tools we discussed earlier are part of the Toolkit created by phData for all things Snowflake. The entire Toolkit is free for any phData customer in perpetuity, which is why these next few tools are (basically) free.

Translation Tool

When migrating existing systems to Snowflake, you’ll always have SQL queries to translate from the existing system’s dialect to Snowflake’s. This is a severe pain that needs to be done manually, which takes a lot of time.

The Translation Tool takes care of all of that for you. Pick from several source languages, copy your query, stored procedure, and DDL statement, or view and hit translate. The tool will spit out the Snowflake version of the query and even beautify it for you while it’s at it.

Data Source Tool

Validating that your data is the same between your old system and Snowflake is also challenging regarding migrations to Snowflake. The Data Source Tool can automate scanning DDL and profiling tables between source and target, comparing them, and then reporting findings. Aside from migrations, Data Source is also great for data quality checks and can generate data pipelines.

Provision Tool

With the Access tool, you saw how complex an information architecture can get while using RBAC in Snowflake. However, the Access Tool just views the architecture; building it out is difficult. Once again, phData comes to the rescue with the Provision Tool.

The Provision Tool allows your team to start producing real value immediately by fully automating the time-consuming task of building out databases, schemas, warehouses, roles, and privileges.

Data Generation Tool

Here’s the scenario: you’re getting new data from a vendor, you know what the schema will look like, and you start building out the raw tables, but then a delay from the vendor… You’re not going to be getting any data for a while. But you still want to start building out the data model.

Enter the Data Generation Tool, which creates ultra-realistic-looking synthetic relational data to jump-start projects using synthetic data before real data is available or to test new scenarios with data that doesn’t exist yet. Data Generation can create data that adheres to constraints and is joinable to other tables, with realistic distributions and configurable correlations.

Closing

As you can see, many excellent free-to-use and open-source tools are available to enhance your Snowflake experience. These tools offer powerful capabilities without the hefty price tag, from data ingestion and transformation to generating synthetic data. By leveraging these open-source and free solutions, you can maximize the value of your Snowflake investment without spending a dime to ensure it’s up and running effectively.

If you need additional assistance or guidance on integrating these tools with your Snowflake setup, please contact the experts at phData.