snowflake-sql-api 0.1.0

Lightweight, pure-Python client for Snowflake's SQL API v2

snowflake-sql-api

A lightweight, pure-Python client for Snowflake's SQL API v2 (the POST /api/v2/statements REST endpoint).

Status: in active development, not yet released. The API may change before v0.1.0.

Why

The official snowflake-connector-python is ~75 MB installed (150 MB with pandas/pyarrow), has an 8-20 s cold start, and ships a compiled extension that slows container builds. For serverless and AWS Lambda workloads that only need to run SQL, that is a lot of weight.

snowflake-sql-api talks to Snowflake's SQL API over plain HTTP (httpx), so it stays small and cold-starts quickly. Core dependencies: httpx, PyJWT, cryptography.

Features

• Synchronous and asynchronous clients with the same surface
• Keypair (JWT) authentication, including encrypted private keys
• Result type coercion (NUMBER/Decimal, dates/timestamps, VARIANT, and more)
• Multi-partition result handling for large result sets
• Query helpers, DML, batch insert, async statement submission
• A small CLI for ad-hoc queries
• Optional pandas ([pandas]) and typed-row ([pydantic]) helpers, kept out of the default install

Install

pip install snowflake-sql-api
# optional extras
pip install "snowflake-sql-api[pandas]"
pip install "snowflake-sql-api[pydantic]"

Quick start

from snowflake_sql_api import SnowflakeClient

client = SnowflakeClient(
    account="myorg-myaccount",
    user="MY_USER",
    private_key_path="/path/to/rsa_key.p8",
)

rows = client.query("SELECT id, name FROM users WHERE active = ?", [True])
for row in rows:
    print(row["ID"], row["NAME"])

Async:

from snowflake_sql_api import AsyncSnowflakeClient

async with AsyncSnowflakeClient.from_env() as client:
    rows = await client.query("SELECT current_timestamp()")

CLI:

snowflake-sql-api query "SELECT current_version()"

Prior art and alternatives

snowflake-sql-api is not the first REST-based Snowflake client. If it does not fit your needs, one of these might:

Project	Language	Notes
snowflake-connector-python	Python	Official driver. Full-featured (DB-API, pandas/Arrow, every auth mode) but large and slow to cold-start. Use it when you need the full driver.
snowflake-rest	Python	The closest prior art and a direct inspiration for this project's API. Pure-Python over requests, sync-only, currently low-activity.
snowflake-sql-api-async	Python	Async-focused, but depends on snowflake-connector-python.
snowflake-sql-api-client	Python	Low-level generated wrapper; unmaintained since 2022.
rb_snowflake_client	Ruby	Mature pure-Ruby SQL API client (streaming, connection pooling).
rsql	Rust	Multi-database SQL CLI with a Snowflake SQL API driver.

How snowflake-sql-api differs: pure Python over httpx with no dependency on the official connector (small install, fast cold start), paired sync and async clients, and keypair auth, type coercion, partition handling, and a CLI as tested first-class behavior.

Note: the similarly named snowflake-sql-api-async and snowflake-sql-api-client are separate, unaffiliated projects.

Acknowledgements

The API design is inspired by pps-19012/snowflake-rest by Pushpendra Singh. This is a clean-room implementation (no code copied); credit for the original design and API shape goes to its author.

License

MIT