Streamlit and Snowflake for Data-Driven Decision Making

Posted: April 12, 2023

Are you a junior developer or data analyst looking to level up your skills in business intelligence (BI) development and data-driven deployment? Today I came across Streamlit. It boasts the promise of a powerful open source community with the additional benefit that Snowflake just acquired it for $800M. Basically Streamlit sits on top of Snowflake to condense your front end development for data visualization. It's a super lightweight alternative to Flask or Django. (Read: much shorter learning curve.)

Streamlit is a Python-based open-source library that allows you to easily create interactive web applications for data visualization and analysis. Snowflake, is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that provides scalable and secure storage and analytics capabilities for handling large amounts of data. Streamlit does a lot of heavy lifting for front end development. Snowflake is really like having a data engineer in your pocket. Together, Streamlit and Snowflake can be a game-changer for BI development and data-driven deployment. As a BI developer my primary use case is within the Snowflake app. From what I've seen it seems like Snowflake has put together a solid offering there.

But, I also want to be able to visualize public and open source data here at Assume Wisely. I can use React, but there are challenges. The main challenge is paying to host the apps in Heroku and integrating the apps into the framework of my static Gatsby React site. Looking at this video, it seems like I can do just that with no overhead.

I guess I have a new toy to play with.

I will say, this is great for rapid prototyping of a report or presentation. But as far as exploring data to find insights I would use a tool like Tableau or Looker.