Drip is an eCommerce Customer Relationship Management platform that gathers and organizes customer data, then enables online retailers to craft personalized omnichannel buying experiences.

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse implemented as a managed service running on Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3 instances. Snowflake separates compute and storage resources, enabling users to scale the two independently and pay only for resources used. It provides native support for JSON, Avro, XML, and Parquet data, and can provide access to the same data for multiple workgroups or workloads simultaneously with no contention roadblocks or performance degradation.

You can collect data from Drip’s servers using webhooks and user-defined HTTP callbacks. Set up the webhook in your Drip account, and define a URL that your script listens to and from which it can collect the data.

Once you've set up webhooks and HTTP endpoints, Drip will begin sending data via the POST request method. Data will be enclosed in the body of the request in JSON format. Here's a sample of what that data might look like.

{
  "id": "z1togz2hcjrkpp5treip",
  "status": "active",
  "email": "john@acme.com",
  "custom_fields": {
    "name": "John Doe"
  },
  "tags": ["Customer", "SEO"],
  "time_zone": "America/Los_Angeles",
  "utc_offset": -440,
  "created_at": "2017-06-21T10:31:58Z"
  "ip_address": "123.123.123.123",
  "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0",
  "lifetime_value": 2000,
  "original_referrer": "https://google.com/search",
  "landing_url": "https://www.drip.co/landing",
  "prospect": true,
  "base_lead_score": 30,
  "lead_score": 65,
  "user_id": "123"
}

You need to map all the data fields in the JSON data from your webhook into a schema that can be inserted into your database. For each value in the response, you need to identify a predefined datatype (i.e. INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them.

Depending on the structure of your data, you may need to prepare it for loading. Look at the supported data types for Snowflake and make sure that the data you've got will map neatly to them.

Note that you don't need to define a schema in advance when loading JSON data into Snowflake.

Snowflake's Data Loading Overview documentation can help you with loading your data. If you're not loading a lot of data, you might be able to use the data loading wizard in the Snowflake web UI, but chances are that that tool's limitations will make it unsuitable as a reliable ETL solution. Another approach involves two steps for getting data into Snowflake:

• Use the PUT command to stage files.
• Use the COPY INTO table command to load prepared data into an awaiting table.

You can copy the data from your local drive or from Amazon S3. Snowflake lets you make a virtual warehouse that can power the insertion process.

Once you’ve coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and move it into your data warehouse, you’re going to have to maintain it. If Drip modifies its webhook implementation, or sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.

Snowflake is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, or Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax, or Panoply, which works with Redshift instances. Others choose a data lake, like Amazon S3 or Delta Lake on Databricks. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Panoply, To Azure Synapse Analytics, To S3, and To Delta Lake.