Key Pair is one of the four types of authentication supported by Snowflake (basic username-password, key pair, SSO, and OAuth). As described by Snowflake, the process is manual, error-prone, and very repetitive when you have to do it for multiple clients, users or accounts. I’ve been planning for a while…

Snowpark is a Snowflake library that can be downloaded and used in Scala or Java client applications to push and execute SQL code in the virtual warehouse, closer to data. The main class here is DataFrame, which allows you to construct SQL queries using a functional-style fluent dot notation. DataFrame…

This is a new Snowflake feature! In February 2022 Snowflake announced support for object dependencies for impact analysis in public preview. Most database object dependencies are now exposed through a metadata view. …

Common problems of the native PIVOT clause in SQL (not just in Snowflake but also in Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server): You cannot dynamically detect and pass all pivot column values. You cannot always group by more than one field, for the row headers. You cannot use more than one…

While Snowflake has today one of the best zero-copy cloning implementations, the concept is not new. And some competitors took notice, trying to emulate this important feature. But let’s introduce what zero-copy cloning means, walking through an easy example using the copy-on-write protocol first. Copy-on-Write Protocol As its name implies, the copy-on-write…

I created the Data Xtractor suite a while ago, with the interactive SQL query builder as one of the main attractions. You connect to a database, metadata is automatically imported, and then you may: Create automatic or custom ER data model diagrams (the Model Xtractor module). Create interactive queries and…

Querying metadata in Snowflake is usually for one single role. You cannot see all object privileges assigned to the current role and to all other inherited roles. Here are some pure recursive SQL queries that help you list all inherited roles, and all their object privileges, starting with one role. Roles in Snowflake as a Direct Acyclic Graph …

I’ll walk you step by step through the process of creating a typical data share chain in Snowflake. I’ll show you why an inbound share and a database created from this share are rather proxies. And why a Reader Account is not a separate account. We’ll see why using more…

The last big news from Snowflake is how to use row access policies to easily implement distributed Data Clean Rooms. The information is super-fresh and not published anywhere else at this moment, not even by Snowflake. Rachel Blum, now a Principal Architect and Field CTO Office at Snowflake, has been…