Hey everyone! So, six months ago, my team finally made the jump from Checkmarx to Semgrep for our SAST needs. I was pretty nervous, honestly—Checkmarx was this big, established name, and Semgrep felt like the new kid. But I wanted to share my experience from a data engineer's perspective, since a lot of our code is Python and SQL for pipelines.
The initial setup was... a breath of fresh air? With Checkmarx, it always felt like wrestling with a huge, complex beast just to get a scan running. Semgrep's CLI tool and the ability to write our own rules in a YAML-like syntax felt so much more approachable. I'm not a security expert, but I could actually understand and tweak the rules for our specific ETL codebase. For example, catching hardcoded database credentials in our Airflow DAGs became a simple, custom rule we could run in CI.
That said, it hasn't been all smooth sailing. The learning curve for writing *really good* custom rules is steeper than I thought. Sometimes I'd write a rule that felt too broad and flagged harmless code, which was overwhelming to triage. And while the performance is generally great, scanning our entire monorepo (with tons of legacy SQL files) sometimes needs careful tuning of the paths.
Overall, I'm happy we switched. The transparency and control are huge wins. But I'm curious—for those of you using Semgrep in data engineering contexts, how do you handle writing precise rules for things like Jinja templates in dbt or complex Airflow operators? Any pitfalls I should watch out for in the next six months?