Connect Twilio to Snowflake: 2 Easy Methods

Twilio allows organizations to reach their customers through simple text messages and interactive communications. It is a customer engagement tool used by organizations to democratize communication channels like texts, voices, chats, videos, and emails through APIs, making it easy to build customer interactions.

With Twilio, you can export these customer interactions into a cloud data warehouses for better data insights and analysis. This data can be replicated into a warehouse like Snowflake using standard APIs or using No-Code ETL (Extract, Load, and Transform) platforms like Hevo which can be set up and run in just a few minutes.

This article will teach you how to connect Twilio to Snowflake using both APIs and automated ETL tools such as Hevo.

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this article, we recommend that you understand the fundamentals of data integration.

What is Twilio?

Developed in 2008, Twilio is a communication platform used by developers for making and receiving calls and exchanging text messages. Twilio is a CPaaS (Cloud Platform as a Service), which allows organizations to add real-time communication like audio, video, and messaging to business applications by using APIs. With Twilio, organizations can send SMS, voice messages, videos, calls, emails, chats, and more and interact with their customers. Organizations need only to integrate the Twilio API with their software, allowing direct communication with customers through apps and websites. Many companies like Twitter, Shopify, Netflix, and more use Twilio for their business applications.

Key Features of Twilio

Cost-effective

Twilio is a cost-effective platform, that allows organizations to control their communication budget. It provides the pay-as-you-go pricing model for various communication through APIs.

Reliable Connections

Twilio enables organizations to provide a seamless communication experience with customers, partners, employees, and more. It offers a 99.95% uptime SLA with zero maintenance windows.

What is Snowflake?

Developed in 2012, Snowflake is a popular, fully managed cloud data warehouse, that can be hosted on any cloud service such as Amazon Cloud Service, Google Cloud Storage, or Microsoft Azure. Snowflake consists of services like data engineering, data lakes, data warehouse, analytics, and more.

With Snowflake, users can organize their data into the optimized, compressed, and columnar format whenever data is loaded into the platform. Snowflake is ready to use platform, as it uses SQL queries to perform data operations. You can start using Snowflake with a free trial of 30 days.

Since Snowflake is a fully managed SaaS platform, users do not need to select, manage, or configure hardware or software. As a result, it is ideal for many organizations that do not want to dedicate resources for setup, maintenance, configuration, etc.

Key Features of Snowflake

Connectors and Drivers

Snowflake enables users to use an extensive set of client connectors and drivers. It includes Python and Spark connectors and drivers like Node.js, Go Snowflake, .NET, JDBC, ODBC, PHP, and more.

Unique Architecture

One main feature that makes Snowflake different from other data warehousing services is its architecture. The architecture of Snowflake enables storage and compute units to scale independently. Therefore, organizations can use and pay for storage and computation separately.

Data Sharing

The data sharing feature in Snowflake allows users to share items from one database account to other without duplicating. As a result, it guarantees more storage space with significantly less computation, which results in faster data accessibility.

Result Caching

Snowflake consists of a unique feature that caches results at different levels. The results can last for 24 hrs after the query is executed. As a result, if the same query is executed, the results are quickly delivered.

Connecting Twilio to Snowflake

Method 1: Manually Connect Twilio to Snowflake Using APIs

Step 1: Exporting Twilio Data Using APIs

The BulkExport API is used to export Twilio data, providing a mechanism to retrieve all your activity logs from the Twilio platform continuously. With BulkExport, you can access the daily records of the previous day’s messages, calls, conferences, conference participants, and more.

After every seven days, the BulkExport files are removed automatically. However, the historical data is stored in the backend of Twilio. You can use the BulkExport API to generate this historical data over a specific range of dates.

The BulkExport API can be used if you have: 

1. A data warehouse to store messaging traffic for analysis.
2. A compliance store to retain messaging for permanent record.
3. Requirements to produce data.

The data exported using the BulkExport API is available under the following base URL. 

https://bulkexports.twilio.com/v1/Exports/<resource_type>

Working of BulkExport

There are four parts of BulkExport.

1. Automate export for each day.
2. Export the specific day’s traffic.
3. Manage exports in progress.
4. Exported days with their output files.

Custom Jobs

Jobs are used to select the range of dates for exporting data. Each data file can be generated for every day in the specified date range. You can request data for up to 366 days in a UTC calendar and view the data of the requested days using the Day resource.

Exported Days

The Days resource allows you to examine the list of exported days. These exported days are already generated by an export job or an automatic daily export. 

Using BulkExport API

You can use the BulkExport API in two ways:

1. You can enable the daily export by leveraging the ExportConfiguration resource if you have the Twilio enterprise edition. It can generate one data file per day for every resource enabled. The system, in this case, tries to create a data file based on the state of the data at that point but can be delayed occasionally. 

2. You can create custom jobs using the ExportCustomJob resource.

After using the BulkExport API, you can use the Day resource for listing all the completed exports day-by-day and downloading the messages of any of these days.

Step 2: Importing Data to Snowflake

The classic user interface of Snowflake provides a wizard for loading a limited amount of data to a table from a small set of files. This wizard uses PUT and COPY commands to load data at the backend.

You can import files into the Snowflake account using the steps below.

Open the Load Data Wizard

Follow the below steps to open the Load Data wizard and load the data.

1. Click on Databases and then click on a specific database link to view the objects stored in that database.
2. Click on Tables.
3. You can select data from the table row and then click on the Load Data, or you can also click on the table name to open the Tables details page and click on the Load Data.

You can then open the Load Data wizard and follow the next steps to select the data warehouse and files to import the data.

Select the Data Warehouse

1.  Select the data warehouse from the drop-down list. You can choose Snowflake for loading the data into the table.
2. Click on Next to select the source files.

Select the Files to Load

You can select the files from your local storage or cloud services such as Amazon S3, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Storage. In this tutorial, you will load the files from the cloud storage.

Loading Data From the Cloud Storage

You can follow the below steps to load your data from the existing files on the cloud storage.

1. From the drop-down list, select the existing Stage name.
2. Click on Next to select the format of the file.

If you do not have existing files on the cloud storage, you can create a new Stage in the cloud.

Selecting a File Format

The drop-down list allows you to select from the named set of options describing the format of your data files. Follow the below steps to choose the existing named file format.

1. From the drop-down list, select the existing file format.
2. Click on Next to select the data load options.

If you do not have files describing your file format, you can create a new file for your required format.

Selecting Data Load Options

1. If your data files encounter errors, you should specify how Snowflake should behave. Check the COPY INTO table section for more details.
2. Click on load.

Snowflake loads your data into your selected table using your selected data warehouse. 

Click on OK, and then the Load Data wizard can be closed.

Limitations of Using the Manual Method for Connecting Twilio to Snowflake

Connecting Twilio to Snowflake using APIs is a complex and time-consuming process. But, if you have the required skills or expert technical teams, you can connect Twilio to the Snowflake account. Besides, exporting data from Twilio and importing it to the Snowflake account manually is not a straightforward process. Moreover, it does not allow users to work on real-time data.

Using reliable and fast-data replication ETL solutions like Hevo, you can eliminate such challenges and exercise a seamless and automated integration experience from Twilio to Snowflake.

Here’s how data replication from Twilio to Snowflake using Hevo works:

Method 2: Using Hevo’s Automated Data Pipelines to Connect Twilio to Snowflake

Hevo Data’s automated, no-code platform empowers you with everything you need for a smooth data integration experience. Connecting Twilio to Snowflake using Hevo involves a simple two-step process:

• Step 1: Configure Twilio as a Source
• Step 2: Configure Snowflake as a Destination
• Step 3: Final Settings

Step 1: Configuring Twilio as a Source

The following steps need to be performed to configure Twilio as a Source:

• In the Asset Palette, click on PIPELINES.
• On the Pipelines List View, Click on CREATE.
• On the Select Source Type page, select Twilio.

• In the Configure your Twilio Source page, specify the following:
  • Pipeline Name: A unique name for your Pipeline, not exceeding 255 characters.
  • API SID: The string identifier (SID) for your API key.
  • API Secret: The secret for your API key, retrieved from your Twilio account.
  • Historical Sync Duration: The duration for which the existing data in the Source must be ingested. Default duration: 6 Months.
• Click TEST & CONTINUE.

Step 2: Configure Snowflake as a Destination

• In the Asset Palette, click on PIPELINES.
• On the Pipelines List View, Click on CREATE.
• On the Add Destination page, select Snowflake as the Destination type.

• In the Configure your Snowflake Warehouse page, specify the following:
  • Destination Name: A unique name for your Destination.
  • Database Password: Password of the database user.
  • Database Name: Name of the Destination database where the data is to be loaded.
  • Database Schema: Name of the schema in the Destination database where the data is to be loaded. Note: Schema name is case-sensitive.
  • Warehouse: The Snowflake warehouse is associated with your database, where the SQL queries and DML operations are performed.
• Click TEST CONNECTION.
• Click SAVE & CONTINUE.

Step 3: Final Settings (Optional)

• This step allows you to set up transformations that can be applied to source data to clean or enrich it.
• This step also allows viewing field mapping from source to destination using the Schema Mapper.

Conclusion

In this article, you learned how to connect Twilio to Snowflake. Twilio is used by hundreds of thousands of businesses and more than ten million developers worldwide for building unique and personalized experiences for their customers. Twilio also allows organizations to export these customer data into data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, and more, which can be used to analyze and understand their customers.

Companies use various sources as they provide many benefits, but transferring data from these sources into a data warehouse is a hectic task. Automated data pipeline solutions help solve this issue, and this is where Hevo comes into the picture. Hevo Data is a No-code DataPipeline with 150+ pre-built integrations, such as Twilio and Snowflake, to replicate your data. Sign up for Hevo’s 14-day free trial and experience seamless data migration.

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