Introducing the Matillion Data Productivity Cloud's new Snowflake Quickstart for data engineering

Snowflake is a cloud-native data platform that offers data warehousing alongside built-in support for natural language processing and machine learning. Snowflake has a multi-cluster shared data architecture that enables high concurrency and scalable performance across diverse workloads and applications.

Matillion is the data pipeline platform that brings push-down ELT and code-optional AI to Snowflake, helping you to accelerate data pipelines for analytics and AI projects at scale.

Snowflake Quickstarts are comprehensive, step-by-step tutorials that guide users through the essential processes and best practices for taking advantage of Snowflake’s cloud data platform capabilities. Quickstarts cover a wide range of topics, from data loading and transformation to security and governance, enabling users - especially those new to the platform - to start developing robust data solutions efficiently and effectively.

Data engineering Snowflake Quickstart

The new Quickstart will guide you through the process of rapidly and effectively loading and integrating enterprise data into Snowflake using the Matillion Data Productivity Cloud. In this data integration scenario, you are dealing with several interconnected data sources and need to derive unified insights.

You will create ETL pipelines to extract, load, transform, and integrate data. The goal is to provide you with insight into the typical development experience when working with Snowflake using Matillion.

Four tables are involved: Orders, Order Items, Item Reference and Customer. The data is sourced from various physical locations, in various formats including Excel and JSON. The tables are related like this:

To run the Quickstart, all you need is a web browser and an email address. It's perfectly fine if you already have Matillion and Snowflake accounts. But if you don't, Quickstart will show you how to set up a free trial.

How to set up free Snowflake and Matillion trials

If you have a Snowflake account already, then you can use Snowflake Partner Connect to initiate a free trial of Matillion Data Productivity Cloud from inside Snowflake. Follow the on-screen instructions to create your Matillion free trial account. Once completed, you can immediately begin to work through the Quickstart guide.

If you prefer, you can take an alternative approach and start a Matillion free trial first.

• Visit the Matillion start page at hub.matillion.com/ and switch to the Sign Up tab.
• Sign up using Google or Microsoft or by entering a business email address and creating a password.
• Verify your email through the link sent to you.
• In the setup screens that follow, input basic information about your goals and cloud region preference.
• When connecting to Snowflake, if you have an account, connect it through Matillion, otherwise opt for "Use a Matillion trial warehouse" to set up a free Snowflake trial account.

After a brief wait while the setup completes, you will access the Matillion Data Productivity Cloud's ETL pipeline designer interface to begin the Quickstart.

Matillion Data Productivity Cloud vs Matillion ETL

Matillion has two Partner Connect listings: Matillion Data Productivity Cloud and Matillion ETL. The Matillion Data Productivity Cloud enhances our current data integration solution, Matillion ETL. 

• Matillion ETL will continue to be our robust, enterprise-grade PaaS-based solution, representing stability and reliability, with a focus on a wide range of refined Snowflake capabilities developed over many years. Ongoing active support and maintenance ensure that Matillion ETL will continue to be a dependable part of your data processing stack.
• Matillion Data Productivity Cloud is a fully SaaS platform that prioritizes user-friendliness and state-of-the-art features, including support for Cortex, Snowpark Container Services, AI Prompt components, and an integrated AI Copilot.

Matillion customers have the choice and flexibility to transition from their existing Matillion ETL estate to the Data Productivity Cloud at a speed and timescale that suits them.

Further reading

• Matillion Data Productivity Cloud Snowflake Quickstart for data engineering
• Snowflake Partner Connect
• Matillion Data Productivity Cloud
• Matillion ETL