API Developers, IT experts, and Business users rejoice! The Winter 2021 announcement of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform is here! With these recent product updates, API developers can build API products faster with a new API user self-service feature while Data engineers can get data sooner with ELT support for BigQuery, and support for CDW stored procedures and Snowflake UDFs. New Snap Packs for cloud messaging services, and enhanced connectivity to many SaaS applications bring expanded connectivity to IT experts for quicker delivery to the market. And finally, Business users will be excited about the enhancements to SnapLogic Flows that enables better collaboration between business users and IT! To learn more about these and other enhancements, read below!
Build API products faster
Managing API users is a time-consuming job. API admins have to provision new users, approve API subscriptions, manage and distribute keys and then are involved again when the keys need to be renewed. And when a human is involved, delays are inevitable. With the new self-service features available in the API Developer Portal, API Admins can be removed from the tedious tasks of API user management.
Individual API users can create an account, subscribe to APIs, and get automatic notification when their subscription is approved or when their API access key is renewed. All of this results in a more efficient API developer, not to mention faster time to value.
To get an in-depth look at the new API user self-service features, check out this video.
Build data products faster
ELT Support for Google BigQuery
SnapLogic continues to build upon the strengths of our ELT offering, and in this release we are excited to announce support for Google BigQuery, another popular, serverless, highly-scalable cloud data warehouse. Adding Google BigQuery strengthens our ability to support critical business objectives and delivers value to customers seeking flexibility when it comes to choosing a cloud data warehouse provider. Additionally, customers who use Google BigQuery, can now leverage SnapLogic’s visual ELT to push down data transformations to their CDW. SnapLogic’s unique visual ELT improves productivity of the data engineers who don’t have to write complex SQL queries or understand ones written by one of their colleagues.
SnapLogic’s ELT solution allows your data teams to have a unified operational view of all ETL and ELT data pipelines in one platform.
To learn more about how you can leverage SnapLogic ELT for Google BigQuery, please check out this demo video.
Stored Procedure and UDF Support
Stored procedures in cloud data warehouses and databases provide better performance, higher productivity, better scalability and easier maintainability. Therefore, we improved the Execute Snap to include support of stored procedures for Redshift, Snowflake, SAP HANA, Azure SQL, and SQL Server databases. For Oracle and Teradata, SnapLogic already provides dedicated stored procedure Snaps.
Additionally in the Execute Snapwe now support Snowflake’s User Defined Functions (UDFs). Now you can leverage non-SQL predefined functions in Snowflake alongside SQL queries. Snowflake UDFs provide the same benefits as stored procedures while also allowing users to leverage other programming languages such as Java.
New Snap Packs for Cloud Messaging Services
Cloud-based messaging services provide an easy way for organizations to leverage scalable and fully-managed messaging services for communication between applications and mobile endpoints. This release adds two new Snap Packs to provide out-of-the-box connectivity to such messaging services.
Azure Service Bus Snap Pack delivers pre-built connectivity to easily manage to message between applications and services including native support for Java Messaging Service. With this new Snap Pack, SnapLogic now provides a convenient solution that allows you to automate workflows that drive process efficiencies and deliver value to your customers. The Snap Pack provides features such as scheduling, throttling, and error handling for a complete solution to message management.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Snap Pack enables message publishing and processing services from Amazon SNS service for application-to-application and application-to-person communication. Just like the Azure Service Bus Snap Pack, this Snap Pack allows you to automate workflows (such as customer service workflows or order management workflows, among others) and can even be leveraged for implementing an organizational Slack-based chatbot to help improve the employee experience. With this Snap Pack, you can create and manage topics, manage subscriptions and send out messages. To learn more about the Amazon SNS Snap Pack, check out this demo video.
Collaborate effectively with IT with SnapLogic Flows
We announced SnapLogic Flows three months back and we have received great response from customers who are looking at ways to empower business users with more self-service options for integrations.
SnapLogic Flows is designed for business users so that they can automate business processes themselves without any help from IT. But the reality is, business users can’t solve all problems on their own. With this release we have enhanced Flows to read data from or write data to a SnapLogic pipeline. This provides for more effective and efficient collaboration between business users and IT professionals. Now, a business user can access and update relevant data from a datastore owned and managed by IT while automating workflows within the SaaS and business applications they own. Similarly, through this mechanism, IT teams can expose powerful data transformations for business users to leverage as building blocks to their workflow processes.
Further, we have enhanced connectivity in Flows to reach strategic endpoints such as ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, as well as collaboration endpoints such as Microsoft SharePoint, and MS Teams. With these new connectivity options, you can automate complex business processes such as automating creation of service tickets in ServiceNow for all opportunities that closed in a given day or sharing a new leads file from a field event with a wider team in SharePoint and then notifying them in MS Teams. Opportunities are numerous and support for more endpoints is being added every month!
Platform updates that improve user experience and resiliency
We have enhanced search of pipeline templates (patterns) within the product to provide an improved user experience and a faster time to value especially for new users. This enhanced search of the pipeline patterns catalog searches sources, destination, descriptions and tags for a given search term so that a new user can quickly find what they need based on the use case at hand and leverage the intelligence of his/her peers to rapidly build automations.
Our efforts continue as we move to make the execution nodes (Snaplexes) even more resilient by adding memory management to Group-by-Fields and Gate Snap.
Group-by-Field is a powerful Snap that can group data across hundreds or thousands of JSON documents. This update allows users to define a max upper bound for the number of documents and dynamically scales that upper bound based on available node memory.
Gate Snap, as the name suggests, acts as a gain and waits for all the inputs before producing an output. In low memory conditions, you now have the ability to configure the Gate Snap to work as a logic gate, where an output is produced as soon as there are inputs at all the input branches.
Another key update of note in the SnapLogic platform is the ability to customize look and feel for an on-brand experience especially for ISV partners and OEM customers for their external customers. Customers can customize the SnapLogic UI with their own logo, tab title, favicon, and menubar color. Customers can also utilize this feature for internal customers who might want different visual queues when working in different orgs.
Figure 5: Customize the look and feel for on-brand experience
Snap and Snap Pack enhancements
- Salesforce Snap Pack
- Support for mutual TLS authentication for all API clients
- Enabled OAuth for all Salesforce Snaps
- Supports document downloads via Attachment Download Snap
- JSON Snaps
- Captures data types and field metadata for easier mapping of data from a JSON source to targets
- Parquet Reader Writer Snaps
- Support for Azure SAS (Shared Access Signature) for enhanced security posture
- Azure Blob Storage Snap Pack
- Enhanced performance to minimize API calls when copying directory and all of its contents
- RabbitMQ Snap
- Enables node cluster configuration to achieve high availability, and continuity through node failures.
To get a complete list of Snap updates, please visit our documentation here.
If you missed the November 2021 product release webinar, you can watch it here and hear from our product team. You can always learn more about these updates by visiting the SnapLogic Documentation.
If you are not yet part of the SnapLogic Community, join the conversation here. Engage with others and get your questions answered, and for upcoming product releases check out the ‘Product Updates’ section in the community to get your first glimpse into what is coming next.
