As a BI Analyst, have you ever encountered a dashboard that wouldn’t refresh because other teams were using it? As a data scientist, have you ever had to wait 6 months before you could access the latest version of Spark? As an application architect, have you ever been asked to wait 12 weeks before you could get hardware to onboard a new application?
Companies realize that in order to grow, connect products and services, or protect their business, they need to become data-driven. In selecting the tools to realize these goals, organizations effectively have two choices: a self-selected combination of analytics tools and applications or a unified platform that handles all. In this blog we will discuss the challenges of the former choice that will provide justification for the latter.
One thing nearly all such data providers have is a REST API. Snowflake’s recently announced external functions capability allows Snowflake accounts to call external APIs. By using external functions, data enrichment providers can fulfill requests for data from Snowflake Data Marketplace consumers.