Introducing new Snowflake integrations with Semantic Views and AISQL

We’re excited to introduce a new integration that brings together the exploratory power of Hex and Snowflake’s new Semantic Views. Starting today, you can define your semantic models in Snowflake and ingest them seamlessly into Hex — making it faster and easier than ever to deliver consistent, governed insights.

Hundreds of data teams use Hex with Snowflake to power their most important work, combining Hex’s flexibility with the world’s leading cloud-native data warehouse.

Today at Snowflake Summit, Snowflake introduced Semantic Views — a new way to define business metrics and logic directly in your database, using a native schema-level object. Since semantic views are native to Snowflake, they follow the same permissions and security as the rest of your Snowflake environment.

As a Snowflake launch partner, we’ve added direct support for Snowflake Semantic Views, putting them alongside our existing integrations with dbt MetricFlow and Cube. Our goal is to allow you to bring trusted context into Hex for a single source of truth, no matter where you define your semantic layer.

With this new integration, you can explore and analyze trusted measures, dimensions, and joins defined in Snowflake — all from Hex’s no-code Explore experience. This means less time rewriting calculations and reconciling discrepancies, and more time digging deeper into analyses and delivering consistent insights to the business.

Using semantic models to supercharge AI

Semantic models provide a way to encode “instructions for use” for your data up front, so everyone can use the same logic downstream. (Here's a quick explainer video on semantic models.)

By integrating with Snowflake Semantic Views, Hex makes it easier for both data and business users to get reliable answers and speed up analytical workflows, without compromising on governance or accuracy. Semantic models are the foundation for teams looking to enable more people to explore data confidently with Explore and Magic.

Semantic models don’t just give people helpful context and guardrails — they do the same for AI. That’s why we’re excited about Ask Magic in Explore — a conversational AI interface deeply integrated in Hex for kickstarting analyses and answering quick questions.

Magic lives where your data team works, allowing it to leverage governed metrics and business logic from your synced semantic models to generate more accurate and helpful outputs. We believe Ask Magic is going to be a big part of democratizing data and providing reliable answers to folks outside of the data team.

Get started: Semantic Model Sync with Snowflake

As a Snowflake launch partner, we got our hands on semantic views early on, and we can attest to how easy it is to hit the ground running.

1. Set up a Snowflake data connection.

2. Create a semantic view in Snowflake Cortex Studio, or use DDL commands right from a Hex notebook.

3. Add a new model on the Settings page, and point it to your Snowflake data connection.

That’s all it takes to sync!

From there, you’re off to the races: browse available metrics and dimensions, dive into Explore for quick and intuitive visual analysis, and use Magic to ask questions on your modeled data. Hex even discovers joinable datasets automatically, so you can skip the modeling work and get to accurate insights faster.

Measures, dimensions, and joins aren’t just for BI workflows — they can also cut down on repetitive work for data teams. In Hex, you can pull semantically-enriched Explore cells into notebooks, and chain them into SQL and Python cells to move from semantic exploration to deep data science workflows.

Want to learn more? Check out our Semantic Model Sync documentation.

Deepening our partnership with Snowflake

We’re excited to be at the forefront of Snowflake’s latest innovations, and it doesn’t stop at Snowflake Semantic Views. Snowflake’s new Cortex AISQL functions are now available directly in the Hex notebook, expanding what’s possible with multimodal LLMs in your everyday workflows.

You can now query and analyze unstructured data like images and text as easily as structured tables. Use simple SQL to classify images, summarize large volumes of text, and even semantically join visual and written data across tables.

For general-purpose tasks, you can already tap into Snowflake Cortex AI, or bring your own fine-tuned model. And as a next step, we’re working with the Snowflake team to power Hex Magic with Snowflake Cortex AI. That way, you can bring the model to your data for more control, better observability, and true model residency. If you’re interested, contact your rep or email us to get in touch!

A more unified world for data teams

Hex is the place where you can bring all of your trusted context and data in one platform for running ad hoc analyses, using AI to accelerate data workflows, publish apps and allowing users to answer their own questions.

Whether you’re looking to cut down on tool sprawl or work in a platform that plays nicely with your semantic layer, thousands of data teams are using Hex to power better decisions across the business.