Experience Snowflake with notebooks¶

Snowflake Notebooks is a development environment that you can use with other Snowflake features. This topic shows how to leverage other Snowflake features within notebooks.

Snowpark Python in notebooks¶

The Snowpark library provides an intuitive API for querying and processing data in a data pipeline. Using the Snowpark library, you can build applications that process data in Snowflake without moving data to the system where your application code runs. You can also automate data transformation and processing by writing stored procedures and scheduling those procedures as tasks in Snowflake.

You can use Snowpark to query and process data at scale in Snowflake by writing Snowpark code in a Python cell of your notebook.

Example usage¶

Snowpark Python comes pre-installed in the Snowflake Notebooks environment. The following example uses the Snowpark library in a notebook to read in a CSV file and a Snowflake table and display its contents as output.

  1. In your notebook, add a Python cell, either using a keyboard shortcut or by selecting + Python. Snowflake Notebooks and Snowpark both support Python 3.9.

  2. Set up a Snowpark session. In notebooks, the session context variable is preconfigured. You can use the get_active_session method to get the session context variable:

    from snowflake.snowpark.context import get_active_session
    session = get_active_session()
    
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  3. Use Snowpark to load a CSV file into a Snowpark DataFrame from a stage location. This example uses a stage called tastybyte_stage.

    df = session.read.options({"infer_schema":True}).csv('@TASTYBYTE_STAGE/app_order.csv')
    
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  4. Load an existing Snowflake table, app_order, into the Snowpark DataFrame.

    df = session.table("APP_ORDER")
    
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  5. Display the Snowpark DataFrame.

    df
    
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Note

Outside of the Snowflake Notebooks environment, you must call df.show() to print out the DataFrame. In Snowflake Notebooks, DataFrames are evaluated eagerly when df is printed out. The DataFrame is printed out as an interactive Streamlit DataFrame display (st.dataframe). DataFrames output is limited to 10,000 rows or 8 MB, whichever is lower.

Snowpark limitations¶

  • A Snowflake Notebook creates a Snowpark session, so you can use most of the methods available in a Snowpark session class. However, because a notebook runs inside Snowflake rather than in your local development environment, you cannot use the following methods:

    • session.add_import

    • session.add_packages

    • session.add_requirements

  • Some Snowpark Python operations don’t work with SPROCs. For a complete list of operations, see Python stored procedure limitations.

Tip

View more examples of notebooks that use Snowpark:

Note

These quickstarts are only shown as examples. Following along with the example may require additional rights to third-party data, products, or services that are not owned or provided by Snowflake. Snowflake does not guarantee the accuracy of these examples.

Streamlit in notebooks¶

Streamlit is an open-source Python library that makes it easy to create and share custom web apps for machine learning and data science. You can build interactive data applications with Streamlit directly in your notebook. You can test and develop your app directly in a notebook. Streamlit comes preinstalled in notebooks, so you can start quickly.

Example usage¶

Streamlit comes pre-installed with the Snowflake Notebooks environment. The example in this section creates an interactive data app using Streamlit.

  1. Import necessary libraries

    import streamlit as st
    import pandas as pd
    
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  2. First create some sample data for the app.

    species = ["setosa"] * 3 + ["versicolor"] * 3 + ["virginica"] * 3
    measurements = ["sepal_length", "sepal_width", "petal_length"] * 3
    values = [5.1, 3.5, 1.4, 6.2, 2.9, 4.3, 7.3, 3.0, 6.3]
    df = pd.DataFrame({"species": species,"measurement": measurements,"value": values})
    df
    
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  3. Set up your interactive slider from the Streamlit library.

    st.markdown("""# Interactive Filtering with Streamlit! :balloon:
                Values will automatically cascade down the notebook cells""")
    value = st.slider("Move the slider to change the filter value 👇", df.value.min(), df.value.max(), df.value.mean(), step = 0.3 )
    
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  4. Finally, display a filtered table based on the slider value.

    df[df["value"]>value].sort_values("value")
    
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You can interact with the app in real time from the notebook. See the filtered table change based on the value you set on the slider.

Tip

For the complete example, see the interactive data app section of the Visual Data Stories with Snowflake Notebooks notebook.

Streamlit support in Notebooks¶

When you use the st.map or st.pydeck_chart Streamlit commands, Mapbox provides the map tiles when rendering map content. Mapbox is a third-party application and is subject to Snowflake’s External Offerings Terms.

The following Streamlit elements are not supported in Notebooks:

Snowpark ML in Notebooks¶

Snowpark ML is the Python library that provides the APIs for Snowflake ML and for custom machine learning model development in Snowflake. Using Snowpark ML, you can develop custom models using APIs based on popular ML frameworks, define automatically updated features to train them, and store them in a model registry for easy discovery and reuse.

Container Runtime for ML provides software and hardware options to support advanced data science and machine learning workloads. For details on container runtime, see Notebooks on Container Runtime for ML.

Important

The snowflake-ml-python package and its dependencies must be allowed by your organization’s package policy.

Example usage¶

To use Snowpark ML, install the snowflake-ml-python library for your notebook:

  1. From the notebook, select Packages.

  2. Locate the snowflake-ml-python library and select the library to install it.

Here is an example of how you can use the Snowpark ML library for preprocessing your data:

import snowflake.ml.modeling.preprocessing as pp

# Initialize a StandardScaler object with input and output column names
scaler = pp.StandardScaler(
    input_cols=feature_names_input,
    output_cols=feature_names_input
)

# Fit the scaler to the dataset
scaler.fit(upsampled_data)

# Transform the dataset using the fitted scaler
scaled_features = scaler.transform(upsampled_data)
scaled_features
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Here is an example of how you can use the Snowpark ML library for model training and inference:

from snowflake.ml.modeling.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier

# Initialize a RandomForestClassifier object with input, label, and output column names
model = RandomForestClassifier(
    input_cols=feature_names_input,
    label_cols=label,
    output_cols=output_label,
)

# Train the RandomForestClassifier model using the training set
model.fit(training)

# Predict the target variable for the testing set using the trained model
results = model.predict(testing)
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Tip

For more examples of using Snowpark ML, see the following notebooks:

Snowflake ML Registry in Notebooks¶

The Snowflake Model Registry allows you to securely manage models and your metadata in Snowflake, regardless of origin. The model registry stores machine learning models as first-class schema-level objects in Snowflake so they can easily be found and used by others in your organization. You can create registries, and store models in them, using classes in the Snowpark ML library. Models can have multiple versions, and you can designate a version as the default.

Example usage¶

To use the Snowflake ML registry, install the snowflake-ml-python library for your notebook:

  1. From your notebook, select Packages at the top.

  2. Search for the snowflake-ml-python package and select the library to install it.

Here is an example of how you can use the Snowflake ML Registry to log a model:

from snowflake.ml.registry import Registry
# Create a registry and log the model
native_registry = Registry(session=session, database_name=db, schema_name=schema)

# Let's first log the very first model we trained
model_ver = native_registry.log_model(
    model_name=model_name,
    version_name='V0',
    model=regressor,
    sample_input_data=X, # to provide the feature schema
)

# Add evaluation metric
model_ver.set_metric(metric_name="mean_abs_pct_err", value=mape)

# Add a description
model_ver.comment = "This is the first iteration of our Diamonds Price Prediction model. It is used for demo purposes."

# Show Models
native_registry.get_model(model_name).show_versions()
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Tip

View this end-to-end example of how to use Snowflake ML Registry.

pandas on Snowflake in notebooks¶

pandas on Snowflake lets you run your pandas code in a distributed manner directly on your data in Snowflake. Just by changing the import statement and a few lines of code, you can get the same familiar pandas-native experience with the scalability and security benefits of Snowflake.

With pandas on Snowflake, you can work with much larger datasets and avoid the time and expense of porting your pandas pipelines to other big data frameworks or provisioning large and expensive machines. It runs workloads natively in Snowflake through transpilation to SQL, enabling it to take advantage of parallelization and the data governance and security benefits of Snowflake.

pandas on Snowflake is delivered through the Snowpark pandas API as part of the Snowpark Python library, which enables scalable data processing of Python code within the Snowflake platform.

Example usage¶

Snowpark pandas is available in Snowpark Python version 1.17 and later. Snowpark Python comes pre-installed with the Snowflake Notebooks environment.

  1. To install Modin, select modin from Packages and ensure that the version is 0.28.1 or later.

  2. To set the pandas version, select pandas from Packages and ensure that the version is 2.2.1.

In a Python cell, import Snowpark Python and Modin:

import modin.pandas as pd
import snowflake.snowpark.modin.plugin
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  1. Create a Snowpark session:

    from snowflake.snowpark.context import get_active_session
    session = get_active_session()
    
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  2. Start using the Snowpark Python API:

    # Create a Snowpark Pandas DataFrame with sample data.
    df = pd.DataFrame([[1, 'Big Bear', 8],[2, 'Big Bear', 10],[3, 'Big Bear', None],
                        [1, 'Tahoe', 3],[2, 'Tahoe', None],[3, 'Tahoe', 13],
                        [1, 'Whistler', None],['Friday', 'Whistler', 40],[3, 'Whistler', 25]],
                        columns=["DAY", "LOCATION", "SNOWFALL"])
    # Drop rows with null values.
    df.dropna()
    # Compute the average daily snowfall across locations.
    df.groupby("LOCATION").mean()["SNOWFALL"]
    
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Tip

For more examples of how to use pandas on Snowflake, see Getting Started with pandas on Snowflake.

Snowflake Python API in Notebooks¶

The Snowflake Python API is a unified library that seamlessly connects Python with Snowflake workloads. It is intended to provide comprehensive APIs for interacting with Snowflake resources across data engineering, Snowpark, Snowpark ML, and application workloads using a first-class Python API.

You can use the Snowflake Python API to manage Snowflake resources by creating, deleting, or modifying them, and more. You can use Python to perform tasks you might otherwise perform with Snowflake SQL commands.

In Notebooks, the session context variable is preconfigured. You can use the get_active_session method to get the session context variable:

from snowflake.snowpark.context import get_active_session
session = get_active_session()
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Create a Root object from which to use the Snowflake Python API:

from snowflake.core import Root
api_root = Root(session)
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Here is an example of how you can create a database and schema using the Python API:

# Create a database and schema by running the following cell in the notebook:
database_ref = api_root.databases.create(Database(name="demo_database"), mode="orreplace")
schema_ref = database_ref.schemas.create(Schema(name="demo_schema"), mode="orreplace")
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Tip

For a more detailed example of how to use Snowflake’s Python API, see the Creating Snowflake object using Python API notebook example on Github.