R, meet Snowflake.

skiLift and skiPatrol are two open-source R packages that bring Snowflake's data platform and ML platform to R users, working from RStudio, Positron, VS Code, the Posit Team Native App or Snowflake Workspace Notebooks.

The packages were originally built by Hex Field founder Simon Field while at Snowflake, and published under Snowflake-Labs as RSnowflake and snowflakeR. Posit has now taken them on to support the R community using Snowflake, alongside its tidyverse and tidymodels ecosystems and development tooling such as the Posit Team Native App for Snowflake. Development has moved to Posit's posit-dev GitHub organisation under the new names.

Hex Field continues to maintain and develop both packages under an agreement with Posit. Read the announcement on the Posit blog →

skiLift

formerly RSnowflake

A DBI-compliant R interface to Snowflake.

• • Connects via the Snowflake SQL API over HTTPS: no ODBC, JDBC, JVM or Python runtime required.
• • Full DBI compliance and dbplyr integration, with Snowflake-specific translations for semi-structured data, arrays and approximate aggregates.
• • Key-pair JWT, programmatic access token, OAuth and SSO authentication, plus shared connections.toml profiles.
• • Optional ADBC/Arrow backend for fast bulk reads and writes.
• • Connections Pane support in RStudio and Positron; zero-config connections inside the Posit Team Native App and Workspace Notebooks.

GitHub repo

skiPatrol

formerly snowflakeR

Idiomatic R functions for the full Snowflake ML lifecycle.

• • Model Registry: log, deploy and serve R models, with batch, SQL and REST inference.
• • Feature Store: entities, feature views and training data, all from R.
• • Experiment tracking, versioned datasets and model monitoring for drift and performance.
• • doSnowflake: a foreach backend for parallel R workloads on Snowpark Container Services.
• • Registered models and features are usable from Python and SQL too.

GitHub repo