Snowflake Connector: Overview

The OCF Connector for Snowflake was developed by Alation and is available on request. Create a ticket with Alation Support about receiving the Snowflake connector package.

This connector should be used to catalog Snowflake data sources in Alation. It extracts Snowflake objects such as tables, columns, views, primary keys, foreign keys, functions, and stored procedures. Users will be able to search and find Snowflake objects, curate Snowflake object pages, and understand the business transformation of their data from the Alation user interface.

Team

The following administrators are required to install this connector:

  • Alation administrator:

    • Installs the connector

    • Creates and configures a Snowflake data source in the Catalog

  • Snowflake administrator:

    • Creates a service account that should have read privileges to access underlying tables/views

    • Provides the JDBC URI to access metadata

    • Provides access to public schemas to extract metadata.

Scope

The table below shows what features are covered by the connector:

Version Support

Snowflake

Core Capabilities

Automated metadata extraction (MDE)

Query-based MDE

Search

Catalog page curation

Catalog sets

Propagation of trust flags

Popularity

Compose

Compose authentication (Basic Authentication)

Compose authentication (OAuth)

Compose query creation

Query execution

QLI

Query based QLI

Filters

Lineage

Predicates

External table files lineage

Sampling and Profiling

Table sampling

Custom query-based table sampling

Custom query-based column profiling

Dynamic profiling

Overrides

Service Account Authentication

Basic (username and password)

Key Pair

Kerberos

Keytab

LDAP

OAuth for Dynamic Profiling

OAuth for Compose

Technical Metadata

Tables

Attributes

Primary keys

Foreign keys

Views

Schemas

External tables

Materialized views

Stored procedures

✔*

Functions

✔*

Function definitions

Tags

Policies

Source comments

Secure views

Secure materialized views

Secure UDFs

* Stored procedures and function will appear in the search results