Data Science in the Cloud: A Recap of the Snowflake and Posit Webinar

In January, we held a joint webinar with Jonathan Regenstein, Head of Financial Services AI at Snowflake, and James Blair, Senior Product Manager of Cloud Integrations at Posit, to discuss our ongoing partnership. We are working together to create seamless and powerful workflows for data scientists to work with data stored in Snowflake, leveraging the strengths of both platforms. The integration offers enhanced security, scalability, performance, and ease of use, ultimately accelerating data science workflows within enterprise organizations. 

Snowflake aims to eliminate data silos by providing a single access point for various data artifacts. This philosophy extends to integrating  Posit tools, making it easy for users to work with data stored in Snowflake directly from their familiar Posit environments. The goal is to create a frictionless experience where data scientists using Posit tools can seamlessly interact with Snowflake data without unnecessary complications. “Snowflake as a platform really tries to eliminate data silos, make it as simple and as easy as possible to access data, data artifacts, things of that nature under one single access point… our goal has been to make it so that Posit, and as an extension users of those tools, can operate in a similar way that it all just works,” says James.

The webinar emphasized authentication, security, and productive workflows, and three tools exemplified these principles. First, Posit Workbench, integrated with Snowflake’s Snowpark Container Services, offers developers familiar environments like RStudio and VS Code with seamless access to Snowflake data. Second, Posit Connect enhances data sharing with Snowflake’s security features to enable granular, viewer-level permissions. Finally, the open-source orbital package facilitates the translation of R models into native SQL that runs within Snowflake’s warehouse, leading to significantly faster model execution and predictions within Snowflake.

Posit Workbench as a Snowflake Native Application

Posit Workbench can now be deployed as a native application within a Snowflake account using Snowpark Container Services (SPCS). “Through Snow Park Container Services, it’s kind of exactly what it sounds like. It’s our containerization feature. If you’re familiar with Docker, you can just imagine it as a way to dockerize anything you want… the Posit team has done all of the hard work of putting this into a Docker container and making it very easy to kind of pull down from the marketplace,” says Jonathan. 

Users can navigate from the Snowflake Marketplace to their native applications to launch Posit Workbench and access their projects. Running Posit Workbench directly within Snowflake allows users to work with their familiar RStudio, VS Code, Jupyter Notebook/Lab, and the new Positron environment within the security and governance of their Snowflake environment. Jonathan demonstrates how to open Posit Workbench natively in Snowflake through SPCS, enabling him to access his projects with ease:

Authentication is streamlined, with users authenticating into Posit Workbench using their existing Snowflake credentials, simplifying the process of accessing and interacting with data in Snowflake. James says, “Posit Workbench handles all that underlying authentication for me. And it’s very easy to get in and just start working with the data that’s available inside of Snowflake.”

Secure Sharing with Posit Connect

Traditionally, managing data access for shared applications often involved service accounts, which could pose security risks. Posit Connect’s OAuth authentication ensures users only see data they have permission to access within Snowflake. James explains, “We’re relying on Snowflake to manage all the data governance and access control. Posit just forwards on the identity of the logged-in user, and Snowflake uses that as it returns results of the queries that are being executed.” Users can share analytical results (static plots, dashboards, web applications, APIs) with granular, viewer-level permissions enforced by Snowflake’s security controls.

Orbital: Executing R Models Natively in Snowflake

The introduction of orbital, an open-source package developed by Posit, enables the conversion of trained R machine learning models into native SQL. Orbital allows for the execution of these models directly within Snowflake. By translating R models into SQL, the prediction process can leverage Snowflake’s powerful compute capabilities, leading to significant performance improvements and time savings compared to running predictions in a separate R environment.

Orbital takes a trained R model object (specifically from the tidymodels framework, which can include pre-processing steps) into a SQL statement. This SQL can then be stored within Snowflake as a view or stored procedure.

This significantly improves the performance of model execution and prediction by leveraging Snowflake’s optimized SQL engine and parallel processing capabilities. Jonathan Regenstein emphasizes, “When I say directly, I mean it’s not going to be executed necessarily in this native app. It’s going to be executed back in a Snowflake warehouse using native SQL. That’s going to make it super super super fast.”

In addition, orbital eliminates the need for data transfer and a separate R runtime for prediction. Because of this, users can see dramatic reductions in model prediction pipeline times.

Summary

The integration between Snowflake and Posit represents a significant advancement for organizations looking to perform data analysis and build machine learning models on data residing in the cloud. We are committed to breaking down barriers between data storage, processing, and advanced analytics with efficient and streamlined packages and tools, providing a more unified and efficient experience for data professionals.

Talk to the team about using Snowflake + Posit today.

• Watch orbital in action at our recent End-to-End Workflow with Posit Team webinar.
• Local to Sacramento and work in the Public Sector? Join us for Data for Breakfast!
• See how Novo Nordisk is leveraging OAuth Integrations to improve data governance and security.