One thing nearly all such data providers have is a REST API. Snowflake’s recently announced external functions capability allows Snowflake accounts to call external APIs. By using external functions, data enrichment providers can fulfill requests for data from Snowflake Data Marketplace consumers.

Many data providers who participate in Snowflake Data Marketplace are already using Snowflake Cloud Data Platform as their primary data store, and they can share secure slices of their data via Global Snowflake, Snowflake’s global data sharing feature, with any other Snowflake consumer regardless of which cloud or Snowflake region each is using. But other potential data providers, especially data enrichment companies, are not yet using Snowflake themselves.