Get Started with the Snowflake SQL API In Postman
Execute standard SQL queries and automate an API workflow in Postman
Database providers usually offer multiple ways to interact with the data. A user console can be helpful to interact with the database directly. Drivers in various languages and frameworks can be helpful to integrate with your own data applications. Most database providers also offer an API for developers tasked with building custom functionality in their own data applications.
Why use an API to interact with a database?
Explore the data
APIs are a familiar and expected developer tool for application integration. For people familiar with APIs, they offer yet another way to learn about and explore the underlying data.
Build your own custom apps and integrations
APIs are a common means of communicating between multilingual apps across diverse platforms. APIs are versatile and offer more flexibility than out-of-the-box drivers, so you can design your own custom functionality, client libraries, and integrations. It can also be easier to manipulate data using this method, such as when migrating or transforming data.
What is the Snowflake SQL API?
Snowflake’s platform is a unified architecture that allows you to integrate data from a wide range of data sources of any type, using it to power use cases across data lakes, data warehousing, Unistore, data engineering, data science, applications, cybersecurity, and collaboration.
Snowflake supports many types of drivers, such as for Go and JDBC, to suit your team’s application stack and experience. They also provide the Snowflake SQL API, a REST API to access and update data in a Snowflake database. You can use the API to do the following:
- Build custom applications
- Migrate existing applications built for APIs
- Integrate with applications that provide a REST Interface
- Integrate with resource-constrained environments
Get started with the Snowflake SQL API in Postman
Check out this quickstart entitled A Postman tutorial for the Snowflake SQL API among Snowflake’s developer resources.
And then fork the sample collection to your own workspace to follow along by clicking the orange button below.
In this collection, get started by exploring these API calls to execute standard SQL queries. The Quickstart folder walks through executing a SQL statement with the API and retrieving the results.
The Polling folder walks through an example sequence of API calls. In our example, you can execute a long-running SQL query, periodically checking if the query has completed, and then get notified when it is completed.
Once you’ve explored the API and one suggested workflow, you can generate the client code to copy and paste your API requests into your own applications and integrations.
Additional resources for the Snowflake SQL API
- A Postman Tutorial for the Snowflake SQL API quickstart
- Getting Started With Snowflake SQL API quickstart
- Snowflake public workspace in Postman
- Configuring Key-pair authentication in Snowflake
