Why did you use Snowpipe? What is it?

Snowpipe is Snowflake’s continuous data ingestion service that automatically loads data from external stages (such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage) into Snowflake tables as soon as new files appear. It uses micro‑batch ingestion, event notifications, and a lightweight COPY INTO command to keep data fresh with minimal latency. The primary benefits are zero‑copy ingestion (no intermediate staging), real‑time analytics, reduced ETL complexity, and cost‑effective scaling because Snowpipe charges only for the compute used during the load. Typical use cases include real‑time dashboards, streaming analytics, and data lake integration where new data must be available within seconds or minutes. In practice, you create an external stage, define a pipe that references a COPY INTO statement, and then enable event notifications or call the Snowpipe REST API to trigger the load. Snowpipe is especially useful when you need near‑real‑time data availability without building a full streaming pipeline.