It's all well and good having a Snowflake account and instance, but it's not much good if you can't interact with it. Fortunately, Snowflake provides a number of methods to do just that.
Snowsight
This is the main Web UI, and it's where you will go to manage your account. You can effectively do everything you need to work with and manage Snowflake here. Run SQL or Python worksheets? Check. Notebooks? No problem. Manage your databases and warehouses? Easy. Manage your account? Go for it! You can even access Snowflake's AI functionality here.
You are likely to spend a considerable amount of time in Snowsight, so have a good play and explore all of the options.
SnowSQL
Many developers prefer a command line interface, and many would also prefer to avoid using the browser. SnowSQL comes to the rescue here. You can install SnowSQL on Linux, macOS or Windows. Connect to your Snowflake instance and you can do pretty much everything you need to do, directly from the command line. All commands start with an exclamation mark, and there's a configuration file you can modify to configure things like connection parameters and variables.
Visual Studio Code Extension
If you want to use a proper, bona fide IDE, download the Snowflake VS Code SQL extension. This allows you to query Snowflake straight from VS Code. But there are other (unofficial) packages available, which you might want to also take a look at. You won't be quizzed on non-official extensions on the SnowPro Core exam though.
Drivers/Connectors
Last up, we have the various drivers and connectors Snowflake makes available. At the time of writing, there's quite a list available. SnowSQL can also be grabbed from this page.
- ODBC driver
- Snowpark API (data pipelines)
- Drivers (for languages including Go, Java/Scala, .NET, Node.js and PHP)
- Scala and Java connectors (for Kafka and Spark)
- SnowCD (Connectivity Diagnostic Tool - for network troubleshooting)
- Snowpark ML (an API for Machine Learning, using SQL or Python)
Have a play with some of these, hope you enjoy yourself!