Connecting a Snowflake database

You can use a Snowflake database as a data source for your GraphQL API by extending the API with the @dbquery directive.

Any Query or Mutation field in your GraphQL schema can be annotated with the @dbquery directive to connect to a database backend.

@dbquery (type: String!, query: String, dml: enum, table: String, configuration: String!)

For more information on the @dbquery directive, see the Custom directives reference.

Use the arguments in the following sections when you want to connect to a Snowflake database as a data source for your GraphQL API.

type

Required. This argument specifies the type of database to query. Supported values are mysql, postgresql, mssql, and snowflake.

table

Optional. The value of this argument is the name of the database table to be queried. While this value is optional, one of either table or query must be specified.

Using the table argument is the equivalent of writing select * from [table]. The field names of the GraphQL type of the annotated field must match the column names of the underlying database table. Thus, if the table has a NAME column, it will populate the NAME field of the GraphQL type.

If the annotated field has arguments, they are used to construct the WHERE clause of the SQL query. For example, let's look at the following annotated field:

customerById (id: ID!): Customer
  @dbquery (
    type: "snowflake"
    table: "customers"
    configuration: "snowflake_config"
  )

The directive passes the following database query to the database specified by the snowflake_config configuration (See Snowflake configuration for more information).

SELECT "id", "name", "email", "creditCard" FROM "customers" WHERE "id" = ?

where, id, name, email and creditCard are the columns of the Snowflake table customers that match the fields of the Customer type.

If the annotated field has multiple arguments, they are combined in the SQL WHERE clause with an AND.

Note: Snowflake's comparisons are case-sensitive, so be careful when naming the arguments to match the Snowflake columns.

query

Optional. The value of this argument is the SQL query whose results are used to populate the sub-fields of the annotated field. While this value is optional, one of either table or query must be specified.

The query argument is useful when you need to perform a complex query, or when the table column names and GraphQL type fields do not match. For example:

customerById (id: ID!): Customer
  @dbquery (
    type: "snowflake",
    query: 'SELECT "id", "full_name" AS "name", "email" FROM "customer" WHERE "id" = ? AND "creditCard" is not NULL',
    configuration: "snowflake_config"
  )

The directive executes the specified SQL query on the database specified by the snowflake_config. The SQL query both renames full_name to name so it matches the field name in the GraphQL type Customer, and retrieves only those customers who have a credit card.

Note: Unquoted column names in Snowflake are converted to uppercase, so make sure that you match the referenced columns in the specified query to the Snowflake columns.

configuration

Required. This argument identifies which configuration in the config.yaml file should be used to connect to the database.

A Snowflake database configuration contains the dsn for connecting to your database, and will look similar to this:

configurationset:
  - configuration:
      name: snowflake_config
      dsn: "username:password@account_identifier/database/schemaname?warehouse=warehousename"

In this example, snowflake_config is the named configuration that will be referenced by the configuration property of @dbquery as configuration: snowflake_config.

To learn more about the configuration settings for connecting to your Snowflake database, see Snowflake configuration.

dml

Optional. Use this argument when the annotated field is a mutation. Its value is an enum that specifies the type of mutation being performed.

Valid values are INSERT and DELETE (do not enclose the value in quotation marks because it is an enum).

The following is an example of a mutation with a annotated field whose dml argument value is INSERT:

type Mutation {
  addCustomerById(id: ID!, name: String!, email: String!): Customer
    @dbquery(
      type: "snowflake"
      table: "customer"
      dml: INSERT
      configuration: "snowflake_config"
    )
}

The selection of the addCustomer field of this mutation results in the execution of an insert statement followed by a select statement in the database Backend, adding the customer and using the inserted values to populate the returned GraphQL Customer type:

INSERT INTO "customer"("id", "name", "email") VALUES (?, ?, ?)
SELECT "id", "name", "email" FROM "customer" WHERE "id" = ? AND "name" = ? and "email" = ?

Next, let's look at an example of using DELETE:

type Mutation {
  removeCustomerById(id: ID!): Customer
    @dbquery(
      type: "snowflake"
      table: "customer"
      dml: DELETE
      configuration: "snowflake_config"
    )
}

The selection of the removeCustomerById field of this mutation results in the execution of a select statement followed by a delete statement in the Snowflake Backend, resulting in the removal of the customer with the specified id and using the deleted values to populate the returned GraphQL Customer type:

SELECT "id", "name", "email" FROM "customer" WHERE "id" = ?
DELETE FROM "customer" WHERE "id" = ?